Dystopian Fiction

East and West

Universe of Terror and Trial

ERIKA GOTTLIEB

McGill-Queen's University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

To Paul, Peter, and Julie

McGill-Queen's University Press 2.001

ISBN 0-7735-2179-8 (cloth)
ISBN 0-7735-2206-9 (paper)

Legal deposit third quarter 2001
Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and
Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.

McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the
Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program

(BPIDP) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for
the Arts for its publishing program.

An earlier version of the concluding chapter, under the title of "Dystopia East and
West: The Writer and the Protagonist," appeared in Vite di Utopia, ed. Vita Fortunati
and Paola Spinozzi (Ravenna: Longo Editore 2000).

Pen and ink drawings are by the author.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Gottlieb, Erika
Dystopian fiction east and west : universe of terror and trial
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-2179-8 (bound) -
ISBN 0-7735-2206-9 (pbk.)

1. Fiction - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Science fiction - History and

criticism. 3. Dystopias in literature. 4. Totalitarianism and literature. 1. Title.
PN56.D94G68 2001 809.3*9372 coo-901550-7

Typeset in Sabon 10/12
by Caractera inc., Quebec City

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Dystopia West, Dystopia East 3

PART ONE DYSTOPIA WEST

1 What Is Justice? The Answers of Utopia, Tragedy, and

Dystopia 25

2 Nineteenth-Century Precursors of the Dystopian Vision 43

3 The Dictator behind the Mask: Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave

New World, and Orwell's Nineteenth Eighty-four 56

4 Dictatorship without a Mask: Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451,

Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Atwood's The Handmaid's

Tale 88

PART TWO DYSTOPIA EAST:

THE SOVIET UNION 1 9 2 O S - I 9 5 O S

5 The Writer on Trial: Socialist Realism and the Exile of

Speculative Fiction 115

6 The Dystopia of Revolutionary Justice: Serge's Conquered City,

Zazubrin's "The Chip," and Rodionov's Chocolate 132,

7 The Legalization of Terror: Platonov's The Foundation Pit,

Ribakov's Children of the Arbat, and Koestler's Darkness at
Noon 152.

INTRODUCTION

Dystopia West, Dystopia East

Dystopian fiction is a post-Christian genre.

If the central drama of the age of faith was the conflict between

salvation and damnation by deity, in our secular modern age this
drama has been transposed to a conflict between humanity's salvation
or damnation by society in the historical arena. In the modern scenario
salvation is represented as a just society governed by worthy represen-
tatives chosen by an enlightened people; damnation, by an unjust

society, a degraded mob ruled by a power-crazed elite. Works dealing
with the former describe the heaven or earthly paradise of Utopia; those
dealing with the latter portray the dictatorship of a hell on earth, the

"worst of all possible worlds" of dystopia.

Even a casual reading of such classics of dystopian fiction as Zami-

atin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-

four will make it obvious that underlying this secular genre the concepts

of heaven and hell are still clearly discernible. In fact, the post-
Enlightenment author's vision of a collective hell for society is not that
far removed from Dante's medieval dream-vision of Dis, the city of hell.
As for the function of hell in the overall framework of The Divine

Comedy, we should remember that the purpose of the narrator-

protagonist's entire journey in hell is to serve him - and his readers -

as a warning to avoid the sin that condemns the sinner to eternal dam-
nation, and to pursue instead the ways up to heaven: Beatrice, who
watches over Dante from above, sends to him Virgil, the voice of reason,
to lead him out of the Forest of Error - the pain and confusion caused
by his sinful state. Under Virgil's guidance the narrator-protagonist has
the unparallelled privilege of travelling through the nine circles of hell
unscathed in order to witness the endless suffering of all those who died

as sinners. Beatrice makes Dante confront these horrors in order to
warn him about the possible consequences of his own erring ways and
thereby to encourage him not to end up in hell.

4 Dystopian Fiction East and West

The strategies of Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell are also significantly

the strategies of warning. As readers we are made to contemplate
Zamiatin's One State, Huxley's World State, and Orwell's Oceania,
each a hellscape from which the inhabitants can no longer return, so
that we realize what the flaws of our own society may lead to for the

next generations unless we try to eradicate these flaws today.

The correspondence between religious and secular concepts in dys-

topian fiction is still so strongly felt that, if we examine Nineteen
Eighty-four closely as the prototype of the genre, twentieth-century
dystopian fiction reveals the underlying structure of a morality play.

Orwell's protagonist, a modern Everyman, struggles for his soul against
a Bad Angel; he struggles for the dignity of the Spirit of Man against
the dehumanizing forces of totalitarian dictatorship.

The parallel could be carried further. While the medieval morality

play implies that the fate of the human soul will be decided at the Last

Judgment, the modern dystopian narrative puts the protagonist on an

ultimate trial where his fate will be decided in confrontation with the
Bad Angel in his secular incarnation as the Grand Inquisitor, high priest
of the state religion and God-like ruler of totalitarian dictatorship.
Given the injustice endemic to the "bad place," this decision will
invariably be in the negative: in Zamiatin's We, D-503 is sentenced to
lobotomy; John Savage in Brave New World to madness brought on

by loneliness and ostracism; Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-four
to a transformation of the individual personality until it embraces all
it abhors, a state worse than the effects of lobotomy. The sinister and
irrevocable transformation of the protagonist represents the irrevoca-
ble damnation of his society. It is one of the most conspicuous features
of the warning in these classics of dsytopian fiction that once we allow
the totalitarian state to come to power, there will be no way back.

As for the origin of the term "dystopia," we find it of comparatively

recent coinage. In his 1946 preface to Brave New World Huxley still
refers to the bad place as a Utopia, using the term he felt stood for
any speculative structure taking us to the future. It was only in 1952
that J.Max Patrick

1

recommended the distinction between the good

place as "eutopia" and its opposite, the bad place, as "dystopia."

In discussing a selection of Russian novels written since Stalin's death

and critical of the Soviet regime's allegedly Utopian purpose, Edith
Clowes borrows Gary Morson's term of "meta-utopia" - that is, a
work that is "positioned on the borders of the Utopian tradition and
yet mediates between a variety of Utopian modes." To distinguish these

books from what she sees as the far more limited scope of dystopian
fiction, she argues that meta-utopia represents a "much greater chal-
lenge to current readers ... than dystopian novels do" because it "refers

Dystopia West, Dystopia East 5

to a social consciousness involving social and cultural pluralism." By
contrast, according to Clowes, dystopian novels advocate a "nostalgic
revision of the past age" and "deconstruct Utopian schemes, only to
abandon the notion of a beneficial social imagination," thereby embod-
ying a "nihilistic attitude toward both the present and the future,
closing both off to a new imaginative possibility."

2

- But is her definition

of dystopia valid if we examine it in the light of such classic examples
of dystopian novels as Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World,
and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four} And is the meta-utopia of Tertz's
The Trial Begins or Daniel's This is Moscow Speaking, included among
Clowes's examples, indeed all that different from the intentions, atti-

tudes, and narrative strategies of these three classics of dystopian
satire? This study will answer both questions in the negative.

As for a thematically more neutral definition of this "bad place,"

3

Lyman Sargent suggests that we look at dystopia as a social structure
that is worse

4

than the present social system. If, however, we listen to

postmodern criticism, relying on thinkers like Foucault, for example,
any society functioning at the present time (or possibly at any other
time as well) could be regarded as such a "bad place."

5

Although I

believe that the postmodern critic's overly broad use of the notion of
dystopia is counterproductive to a clear definition of what is unique
about dystopian thought or dystopian fiction, I also believe that Pro-
fessor Sargent's definition of dystopia as a system worse than our own
probably does not cover all works with a dystopian impetus. In fact,
if we take a look at works of political criticism produced in Eastern
and Central Europe commenting on the injustice rampant in the
writer's own society during periods of dictatorship and terror, these
works are still clearly expressive of the dystopian impulse, although
they deal with the writer's own society "as is." In other words, there
are historical phenomena that create societies that should be described
as dystopic, societies where the literary imagination refuses to envisage
a world worse than the existing world of reality. Therefore, before we
are to arrive at a comprehensive delineation of the salient characteris-

tics of dystopian fiction as a genre, maybe we should also define the
characteristics of a society that is dystopic.

It has been said by Hungarian essayist Bela Hamvas that the modern

age has been spent "under the aegis of the tension between Messianism
and dictatorship."

6

Throughout the nineteenth century the world

awaited a secular Messiah to redress the ills created by the Industrial
Revolution in a double incarnation: first as science, which was to create
the means to end all poverty, and second as socialism, which was to end
all injustice. By eagerly awaiting the fulfilment of these promises, the
twentieth century allowed the rise of a false Messiah: state dictatorship.

Dystopian Fiction East and West

Dystopia West, Dystopia East

It may not be unfair to speculate that the oscillation between the mask
of the Messiah and the cruel face of an all-powerful Dictator behind
the mask is what delineates the parameters of dystopian thought and
creates the suspense in dystopian fiction of the protagonist's nightmare
journey to "unmask" the secrets held by the "High Priest" of the

political system. In Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four this nightmare journey ends invariably
in the protagonist's trial, followed by retribution tantamount to his
destruction or, even more horrifying, to his sinister transformation.

In the context of the Soviet experiment of building socialism, Koestler

and Orwell were certainly not the first, although they were among the
best-known thinkers in the 1940s who decided to show the real face
of dictatorship behind the Messianic mask. This effort at "unmasking"
was not well received by their confreres, the leftist intellectuals in the
West, whose virtually religious infatuation with the Soviet Union as
the only country in the world that was building socialism started at
the time of the 1917 revolution. For some this infatuation was sus-
tained through Stalin's show trials in the 1930s and into the early

1950s; for many, probably right up to the violent overthrow of the

Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and for still others right up to the
crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968.

At these various junctures in history the leftist intelligentsia in the

West was confronted with the disheartening fact that the Messianic
promise of the age-old Utopian dream of socialism as a cure for the

clearly obvious pathologies of capitalism had merely led to new pathol-
ogies in the form of the virulent psychoses of totalitarian dictatorship.

What should these new pathologies be attributed to? Stalin's patho-

logical personality? To the fact that the young Soviet Union had to
struggle with potentially overwhelming external enemies? Or to the
historical irony that made the Bolsheviks successors of an autocratic

regime that had created a tempting precedent? Perhaps to the fact that
Stalin's revolution (or counterrevolution) in 192.9 gave rise to a ruth-
lessly self-serving new bureaucracy - a new ruling class? These are not
the questions to ponder at this point. Maybe one is left frustrated
discussing the flaws of socialism because, as Chesterton said of Chris-
tianity, it is something that has never been tried yet. Thus, in the case

of Stalin's regime, one could argue that the slogans ostensibly drawing
on Marx's theories of socialism were nothing but a camouflage for
Russian nationalism and imperialism, or simply for Stalin's and his

self-serving elite's thirst for power.

Other historians and political analysts, of course, concentrate on

elements in Marxist theory that they see as conducive to the develop-
ment and legitimization of a totalitarian regime. Some ponder whether

we should not relate the terror and coercion of Stalinism to the
intellectual coercion implied by Marx's notion of historical determin-
ism. Others raise the question whether the Party's oppression of all
opponents and its disregard for the universal principles of human
justice are not the consequences of Marx's failure to provide a sufficient
model for a political process of persuasion and for a juridical system
based on respect for human rights. Marx did make the assumption
that once the proletariat came to power and established socialism, the
very notion of political and legal mechanisms that had been necessary
to resolve conflicts created by the economic injustice inherent in a class
society would become superfluous.

7

Be that as it may, in the field of history the shocking reversal between

high Utopian expectations and deep disillusionment with the Soviet
attempt at socialism has been central to the nervous vacillation of the
utopian-dystopian axis of our times, demonstrable not only in the more
abstract realm of political thought but also in the internal and external
politics of individual nations or entire power blocs.

In the realm of literature it has been a task worthy of the greatest of

political satirists to comment on this reversal as having revealed the cru-
elty of dictatorship under the false Messiah's mask of hypocrisy, and to
exhort the reader to see beyond the mask. At the same time it has also

been a task awaiting the pen of the tragedian to express the emotional
charge of the loss of faith and the disillusionment over what Camus
called "the tragedy of our generation ... to have seen a false hope."

8

Exploring this double impetus of satire and tragedy in the plethora of
dystopian fiction in the twentieth century, this book asks three funda-
mental questions:

First, what are the most salient characteristics of dystopian fiction

if we concentrate on such well-known representatives of this specula-
tive genre as Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-
four, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, and
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale} All these works are political satires,
projections of the fear that their writers' own society in the West - a
term confined here somewhat arbitrarily to Great Britain and North
America - could be moving towards a type of totalitarian dictatorship
already experienced as historical reality in the

USSR

and in Eastern

and Central Europe. Although written in Russia, Zamiatin's We also
belongs to this tradition by virtue of its undeniable influence on Orwell
and the likelihood of its direct or indirect influence on Huxley. Written
in 1920, only three years after the revolution and almost a decade

before the Stalinist consolidation of terror, We also projects its writer's
fear of a fully totalitarian rule almost ten years ahead of its realization;

8 Dystopian Fiction East and West

undoubtedly, at the time of writing the novel Zamiatin still believed
he could warn his contemporaries that such a system could take hold
in the future.

But if fear of the emergence of a totalitarian regime is the major

component of the dystopian impulse, can we still speak of dystopian
fiction in the Soviet Union after Zamiatin and in the satellite countries
after 1948? (The East is confined here, for the sake of space, to the

USSR

between the 19ZOS and 1991, and to Poland, Hungary, and

Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989.) Can we speak of dystopian
fiction in a society where the "greatest fear" so typical of this specu-
lative, quasi-prophetic, exhortatory genre has already been fulfilled and

become a fact of life, in the form of the State's "totalist" control
through censorship, propaganda, intimidation, and indoctrination?

Finally, if we agree that works of dystopian fiction indeed emerged

in the

USSR

and in the three satellite countries in the periods of

dictatorship, how do these works differ from their Western counter-
parts, whose aim it was to warn against and prevent the coming of
the nightmare state?

DYSTOPIA EAST AND WEST

The West

Let us begin, then, with our first question about some of the more
general characteristics of dystopian fiction in our selection. Zamiatin's

We, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, Brad-

bury's Fahrenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale constitute a clear counterpoint to Utopian fiction; in
addition, however, we must realize that the dystopian novel itself
demonstrates the push and pull between Utopian and dystopian per-

spectives. To a significant extent, each of these novels makes us ponder
how an originally Utopian promise was abused, betrayed, or, ironically,
fulfilled so as to create tragic consequences for humanity.

THE PUSH AND PULL BETWEEN UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN

PERSPECTIVES

If we begin with We, Brave New World, and Nineteen

Eighty-four, it becomes obvious that each dystopian society contains
within it seeds of a Utopian dream. These are articulated by the ruling
elite's original promise when its new system was implemented, a

promise that then miscarried (in We); was betrayed (in Nineteen
Eighty-four); or was fulfilled in ways that show up the unexpected
shortcomings of the dream (in Brave New World).

The inner contradiction between Utopian dream and dystopian real-

ity was, by the way, also a significant element of specifically anti-fascist

Dystopia West, Dystopia East 9

dystopias, such as Jack London's The Iron Heel, Sinclair Lewis's It

Can't Happen Here, and Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night. How-

ever, the fascist Utopia, even in its original promise, carried only limited
appeal for humanity as a whole, since it was not only an elitist Utopia
designed exclusively for a master race but also a dream envisaging the
elimination or domination of "inferior races" - the larger portion of
humanity. The fear that such a "dream" might still have its followers
in the West motivated Lewis and Burdekin, as it did Virginia Woolf's

Three Guineas, which could also be read as some kind of non-fictional

dystopian warning against fascism, exploring the potentially fascist
elements of the patriarchal society of 1930s England.

In contrast to fascism, the age-old dream of socialism was a Utopia

incorporating the universal premises of humanism and therefore had
an extremely wide appeal. Through the works of Marx, Engels, and
the explication and analysis of their work, socialism became the foun-
dation of one of the most comprehensive and compelling thought-
systems ever created. The spectacle of this Utopian aspiration but-
tressed by such a powerful theory turning into dystopian societies of
terror and dictatorship produced a veritable onslaught of dystopian
fiction in our century. The greatest fear of the authors of such fiction
was that the totalitarian dictatorship operating in the Soviet Union and
later in the Soviet bloc could too readily be condoned in the West
precisely because the Western intelligentsia could not, or would not,
recognize that it was terror that this allegedly socialist regime shared
with its allegedly greatest opponent, fascism. Koestler's Darkness at
Noon and Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four are among
the most widely known works that articulate this fear.

In dystopias like Fahrenheit 451, Player Piano, and The Handmaid's

Tale the new American ruling class does not start out with a consistent
Utopian ideology; it promises only to deal with an emergency situation,

to find an allegedly efficient solution to a crisis. This "solution," then,
becomes a modified system of a quasi-utopian ideology expressed
through a limited number of slogans of the state religion. However,
none of the High Priests - Bradbury's Fire Chief Beatty, Vonnegut's
Papa Kroner, or Atwood's Commander - feels it necessary to justify
his own role or to cover up for specific elements of totalitarianism
such as denunciations, oppression, and the lies of propaganda, ele-
ments borrowed - without the coherent ideology - from both Stalinist
and Hitlerian models of dictatorship. (I tend to think that the dystopias
of Anthony Burgess's Ripening Seed or 1985 could probably also be
classified as such "emergency" dystopias, where, except for unleashing
the mass hysteria of violence against a specific group of scapegoats,
the elite does not even pretend to offer the population a comprehensive
faith or Utopian ideology to believe in.)

Dystopian Fiction East and West

Dystopia West, Dystopia East

Undoubtedly, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-four, Fahrenheit

451, Player Piano, and The Handmaid's Tale are addressed primarily
to the Western reader; their most specific aim is to explore the social-
political pathologies of capitalism in the context of Britain or North
America. Nevertheless, the intensity of the "greatest fear" that drives

the visionary aspect of Western dystopian fiction happens to be the
fear that by falling for the seductively Utopian promises of a dictator-
ship hiding behind the mask of the Messiah, Western democracy could
also take a turn in the direction of totalitarianism, following the
precedents of historical models already established by fascist and
communist dictatorships in Eastern and Central Europe.

THE DELIBERATE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE: THE PROTAGONIST'S
TRIAL

The next common characteristic of the six works also follows

from the conflict between the elite's original Utopian promise to estab-
lish a just, lawful society and its subsequent deliberate miscarriage of
justice, its conspiracy against its own people. The mystery of this
conspiracy and of the elite's self-justification will be revealed to the
protagonist at his own trial, followed by inevitably harsh punishment.
The experience of the trial is imbued with the nightmare atmosphere
typical of dystopia. We become aware of the duality of law and
lawlessness, and the contradiction between advanced technology and
a psychologically, spiritually regressive mentality at the heart of the
regime. In this study I suggest that the protagonist's trial as an emblem

of injustice is a thematically and symbolically central device of dysto-
pian fiction. The structural and thematic importance of the trial is
probably most conspicuous in Nineteen Eighty-four, where in the course
of Winston's trial, which takes up one-third of the novel, in the very
process that systematically deprives him of selfhood, consciousness,
loyalty, and memory, the value we set on selfhood and consciousness
are made fully apparent. The protagonist's trial plays a similarly
significant role in Brave New World, We, Fahrenheit 451, and Player

Piano, as the central scene that juxtaposes the protagonist's belief in
individualism with the elite's ideology, aimed at the elimination of the
individual. (In The Handmaid's Tale the ruling elite of Gilead no longer
stages either public or secret trials: the recurring theatricals of "sal-
vaging" combine the process of interrogation, trial, and execution
within the same horrifying ritual.)

A BARBARIC STATE RELIGION - NIGHTMARE VISION The next

characteristic of these six works still follows from the experience of
the trial, where the protagonist recognizes that instead of the rule of
civilized law and justice, dystopian society functions as a primitive

state religion that practises the ritual of human sacrifice. It is here that
the reasoning that motivates the dystopian state's dualities of law and
lawlessness, propaganda and truth, advanced technology and regres-
sion to barbarism is revealed to us, and this revelation further contrib-
utes to the nightmare atmosphere of the dystopian novel. Orwell's

Oceania is ruled by hatred, fear, and treachery; Bradbury's world by
firemen who do not extinguish fires but set fire to books, houses, and
people; Vonnegut's Ilium by robots and computers that make human
beings feel superfluous; Atwood's Gilead by men who use women as
baby machines, eventually to discard them to die of the consequences
of cleaning up nuclear waste. We are faced here with societies in the
throes of a collective nightmare. As in a nightmare, the individual has
become a victim, experiencing loss of control over his or her destiny
in the face of a monstrous, suprahuman force that can no longer be
overcome or, in many cases, even comprehended by reason. Beyond the
sense of displacement typical of nightmares, we also become aware of
the peculiar logic of a mythical, ritualistic way of thinking in dystopian
societies, not unlike the logic inherent in obsessive-compulsive disorders
and in what Freud observed as the coupling between megalomania
and paranoia.

9

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S PRIVATE WORLD W h a t

looms large in these six writers' greatest fear of totalitarian dictatorship
is the particular horror of the monster state's propensity to combine
the spirit of a barbaric state religion with advanced technologies
capable of spreading propaganda and indoctrination by electronic
means and through the use of mind-altering drugs. The power of the
modern state not only to control action but also to enter what Orwell
called "the few cubic centimetres" within the skull makes it capable

of achieving total domination over the individual's private self, family
feelings, sexuality, thoughts, and emotions.

In effect, the destruction of the demarcation line between the public

and the private spheres is one of the most striking common charac-
teristics of the societies depicted by the six novels in question.

10

In

Zamiatin's One State the inhabitants live under a glass dome within
ultramodern glass cages. In Orwell's Oceania, Big Brother's eyes
follow Winston mysteriously in every situation, even in his dreams. In
Huxley's World State people are never left alone. It follows from this
emphasis on public exposure that even the most intimate personal
relationships are prescribed and controlled by the state: in Oceania
males and females are to deny their sexuality; in the World State and
the One State they have to abide by the rules of state-enforced pro-
miscuity. In Fahrenheit 451 human relationships are so depersonalized

12 Dystopian Fiction East and West

that husband and wife simply do not remember any distinctive event

from their private lives together; in The Handmaid's Tale sexual rela-
tionships are regimented and supervised by the ruling elite, ostensibly
in the interest of producing the maximum number of children for the

state but actually mainly to eliminate chances of forming personal
relationships and private loyalties. The state's intent in all five novels
is to deny the bonds of private loyalty and thereby to enforce not only
uncritical obedience to the state but also a quasi-religious worship of
the state ideology. In accordance with the same intent, the bond

between parent and child is also radically broken: in Oceania children
are trained to denounce their parents; in the One State and the World
State there are no families. The overall effect is that actions and
emotions that were previously associated with the individual's private
world suddenly become public domain, fully under the punitive control
of the state machine.

Even more important, by breaking down the private world of each

inhabitant the monster state succeeds in breaking down the very core
of the individual mind and personality - what remains is the pliable,
numb consciouness of massman. Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell, as it
were in unison, warn that once we accept such a process, it could
become world-wide and irreversible. Ultimately, by being relentlessly
bombarded by state propaganda while also being deprived of privacy

and intimate relationships, we may be deprived of the core of our
being, our personal memory of the past.

THE PROTAGONIST'S PURSUIT OF HISTORY: THE VITAL IMPORTANCE
OF A RECORD OF THE PAST

Consequently, probably one of the most

typical "messages" of dystopian fiction is that access to the records of
the past is vital to the mental health of any society. Living in a night-
mare world of mythical thought approaching the logic of a mental

disorder that no longer differentiates between present and past, cause
and effect, or lies and truth, each protagonist is eager to obtain and
hold on to a genuine record of the past, a past the totalitarian regime
would like to distort or deny completely. In order to create or obtain
such a record, the protagonists in We, Nineteen Eighty-four, and The

Handmaid's Tale decide to keep a diary. In Brave New World, Fahren-
heit 451, and Nineteen Eighty-four the protagonists pursue what each
considers the most important books from the past: Shakespeare and
the Bible in Brave New World; the Bible and the classics of nineteenth-
century fiction in Fahrenheit 451; and Goldstein's Book in Nineteen
Eighty-four. It is through these diaries or these books that the protag-

onist wants to break the isolation the dictatorship has created by cutting

Dystopia West, Dystopia East 13

off man from woman, parent from child, friend from friend, the present
from the past, and the world within from the world outside the regime.

DYSTOPIA AS A NO-MAN'S LAND BETWEEN SATIRE AND
TRAGEDY

The next two common characteristics of the Western model

of dystopia relate more directly to the structural features of genre

(although, naturally, the thematic and generic characteristics are closely

related). Generically speaking, all six novels so far examined occupy
some kind of no-man's land between tragedy and satire. The protago-
nist's experience and fate is tragic in the sense that it deals with irrevo-
cable loss on the personal level: he or she loses his position, his beloved,
his freedom, and in the first three examples faces a loss possibly even
worse than the loss of life: the loss of his private, individual identity.

Yet the tragic elements of the protagonist's fate nothwithstanding,

the overall strategies of the dystopian novel are those of political satire.
The writer offers militant criticism of specific aberrations in our own,
present social-political system by pointing out their potentially mon-

strous consequences in the future. The function of the message is that
of a warning, an exhortation. "Should you not recognize these specific
aberrations in your present, and should you allow them to go on
unchecked," the writer can be heard to say to us, "you will no longer
be able to prevent the development of the horrifying nightmare system
of London 651 AF, Oceania, or Gilead, in which the protagonist's tragic
fate will have become simply inevitable." Indeed, different as these six
works may be from one another, they have this common generic
denominator: each is a tragedy, but a somewhat unusual form of
tragedy that also accommodates the didactic strategies of satire, a
tragic story within the framework of an exhortation, a tragedy in the
conditional mood only.

But let us take a closer look at the relationship between tragic and

dystopian perspectives. Clearly, if we think of Oedipus Rex or Hamlet,
it becomes evident that great tragedy touches upon the essential elements
of the utopian-dystopian discourse. As long as that incestuous parricide,
Oedipus, is basking in the false security of his kingship, the polis of

Thebes turns into a dystopic nightmare society of illness, corruption,

and paralysis. The plague-stricken society cannot purge itself or renew
itself ibabies are stillborn) until its ruler undertakes to administer justice
by seeking out and punishing the criminal who upset the legitimacy of
the social-political order by murdering Laius, king of Thebes.

The concept of Utopia as a well-run model of an ideal state of justice,

and its nightmarish reversal as a systematic miscarriage of justice in
dystopia, play an equally important role in many other tragedies. In

14 Dystopian Fiction East and West

fact, Utopia and dystopia could be defined as the mirror-images Hamlet
holds up to his mother in the famous closet scene in order to make

her recognize the right moral course she should be taking. Hamlet
forces Gertrude to look at the images of two brothers: "Look here
upon this picture and on this / The counterfeit presentment of two
brothers" (m.iii.53-4). The first picture is the portrait of Hamlet's

father, the model of the good king, the legitimate ruler who assures
justice and harmony in society, a structure that (except for the pastoral
retreat from politics in the Forest of Arden and the retreat into magic
on Prospero's island) comes closest to Shakespeare's notion of Utopia.
The second picture is the portrait of Claudius, the ruler who came to
the throne by breaking a law based on the universal concept of justice

and who, if he wants to maintain his ill-gotten power, is obliged to
keep on lying and committing one act of injustice after another until
the entire state of Denmark comes to mirror its ruler's corruption and
is led to its disintegration. (In his 1996 film version Kenneth Branagh
directed Hamlet as such a political parable of dystopia. After Hamlet's

death the troops of Fortinbras hurl themselves at the glass doors,
meeting no resistance at the fortress of Elsinor, which has been left
weak and defenceless by the corrupt king and his intrigues against his
own people. Branagh adds a final touch of dystopian violence: as the
troops take over, they knock down the statue of Hamlet's father, the
reminder of the good king's rule of justice.

11

) How readily the charac-

ters of Claudius, Edmund, Macbeth, or Richard in lead us to smile
in recognition as they prefigure the virtually unstoppable spiral of

deceit and violence familiar from the workings of modern dystopian
societies, where "what deceit wins, cruelty must keep" (Yeats), so that
the original act of violent injustice is bound to breed further and
further deceit and further and further violence.

Much as we acknowledge the utopian/dystopian propensities of

tragedy, few of us can read such classics of political satire as Gulliver's
Travels or Candide without experiencing occasionally something of the
tragic shudder of Sophoclean irony, the ultimately tragic fate of man's
ambition to reach perfection of self or society. Both tragedy and satire

are capable of staking out the extremes of the human predicament:
not only Oedipus Rex and Hamlet but also Gulliver's Travels and
Nineteen Eighty-four make us ponder such ultimate questions as What
does it mean to be human? Is there a point at which we could be made
to lose our humanity?

Still, we should recognize the fundamental difference between trag-

edy and political satire. Unlike tragedy, dystopian satire is not satisfied
with asking questions, and the questions it asks are not directly about

our place in the universe and the limits of our free will in the face of

Dystopia West, Dystopia East 15

suprahuman forces. Dystopian satire focuses on society, not on the
cosmos, and it has a primarily social-political message, a didactic intent
to address the Ideal Reader's moral sense and reason as it applies to
the protagonist's - and our own - place in society and in history.

THE PROTAGONIST'S WINDOW ON THE PAST: TWO TIME-

PLANES Ultimately, by recognizing the vital significance of a truthful
approach to history in the protagonist's life, readers become increas-
ingly aware of the important distinction between the two time-planes
inherent in the structure of these dystopian novels. The protagonist's
tragic fate is in the conditional mood only: how it plays out in reality
depends on whether we come to understand the historical process that
could destroy our society, so that we may break the impasse of the
historical prediction. Here we come to another salient characteristic of
dystopian satire. However compelling the protagonist's personal fate
in the novel, as Ideal Readers we eventually have to recognize our
distance from him or her: he lives on a time-plane different from our
own; he exists in our hypothetical future. In fact it is crucial not only
that we identify the difference between his time and ours but also that
we recognize that these two time-planes are joined in a cause-effect
relationship. Each of the six novels that we have chosen to represent
the Western model of dystopia contains what I would call a "window
on history," a strategic device through which the writer reveals the roots
of the protagonist's dystopian present in the society's past. Of course,
what the protagonist defines as the past happens to be the present of
the Ideal Reader to whom the exhortation is addressed at the time the
satire is written: "Beware: the protagonist's present could become your
future." Consequently, it is in our world of the present that we should
fight the specific trends that the satirist suggests could, but should not
be allowed to, develop into the monstrous nightmare world of the future.

Each writer focuses on a different trend he finds threatening. In Brave

New World, for example, we hear about the premoderns of the 1930s

- "our" time, that is, the time of the writing of the novel - who were

first faced with the challenge to distinguish between two alternatives:
use the machine to serve humanity, or enslave humanity in the service
of the machine. The world of 651 AF reveals the consequences of the
premodem's failure (our potential failure) to rise to this challenge.

11

In Nineteen Eighty-four the butt of the satire is probably more

specifically focused. It is the satirist's Adversary, the Western intellec-
tual of the late 1940s, who accepts and condones the totalitarian
methods of Stalinism. Orwell's point is that the Adversary's condoning
of Stalinism as a representative of true socialism is based on the
Adversary's readiness to worship the God of Power. It is this totalitarian

i 6

Dystopian Fiction East and West

mentality in the West in the 1940s that could lead to the horrors of
Oceania, a state consciously modelled on former totalitarian regimes
such as Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. That the transfor-
mation of the West came from within and not from a foreign power

is demonstrated by the perfect equilibrium that exists among Oceania,
Eastasia, and Eurasia in 1984.

Since Winston is probably a far more psychologically compelling

character than any of his fellow protagonists from the other novels, as
readers we need a more complex distancing mechanism in order to be
able to disassociate ourselves from the character's tragic fate while

decoding the satirist's social-political message to us. Orwell achieves this
distancing by introducing two "books within the book," Goldstein's
Book, which describes how the past of the 1930s and 1940s led to the
world of Oceania in 1984, and the Dictionary of Newspeak, which
draws attention to the possible future of Oceania in 2035. Urged to
contemplate the distance between these different time-planes, we are

also expected to realize that Winston's fate is acted out not in our
present but in our hypothetical future. The catastrophe responsible for
his tragedy is still a catastrophe that we could help to prevent. (The
conference of the historians after the fall of Gilead - the appendix to
Atwood's novel - serves the same purpose of emotional distancing

between the reader and the protagonist, and to the same effect.)

Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1951), Vonnegut's Flayer Piano (1952),

and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) are just as consistent in
establishing the relationship between what the author sees as the flaws

in his or her society in the present and the monstrous consequences of
these flaws that could result in a nightmarish state in the future. In
Fahrenheit 451 the author lets the protagonist find out that the mon-
strous regime in his present could come about only because of the neg-

ative trends rampant in the early 1950s: the acceptance of political
censorship in the McCarthy era, and the shift from the reading of the
classics in favour of reading the Reader's Digest or watching television.
In Player Piano we find out that it was the atrophy of the humanities
and the worship of the machine, particularly the computer, in the early

1950s, together with the acceleration of technology after a Third World

War, that prepared the monster world of the Ilium of the future. As for

The Handmaid's Tale, the fundamentalist, anti-feminist military dicta-
torship of the Gilead of the future could come to power only as a result
of our political sins of the 1980s: the effects of fallout following nuclear
experiments; the rise of fundamentalism, with its anti-feminist backlash;
and our inadequate resistance to these phenomena. The writer of dys-
topian fiction offers in each novel a warning against a future that could

and should still be avoided by the Ideal Reader's generation.

Dystopia West, Dystopia East 17

It is only when we recognize the distinction between these two time-

planes as well as their cause-effect relationship that we can proceed to
decode the specific targets of the dystopian satire. This distinction
between the two time-planes that forms an essential characteristic of
the Western tradition of speculative fiction is conspicuously absent
from the dystopian works written under the totalitarian dictatorships
of Eastern and Central Europe.

The East: The

USSR,

Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia

Having observed the interaction between some characteristic structural
and thematic elements of the dystopian genre in six representatives of
its classic Western model, I turn to my second and third questions. If
the central impulse behind dystopian fiction is the writer's warning
against the emergence of the monster state of totalitarian dictatorship
in the future, can we speak of a genre of dystopian fiction in the Soviet
Union between 1920 and 1991 and in what used to be the Soviet bloc
between 1948 and 1989? If there are indeed expressions of the dysto-
pian impetus in fiction here, do these works show a significant differ-
ence from their Western counterparts, and if so, what is the nature of
their difference?

To narrow down the vast material relevant to this question, parts 2

and 3 of this study concentrate on a selection of works of fiction
written under various phases of totalitarian dictatorship in the

USSR,

Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, dealing with the deliberate
miscarriage of justice. After a brief examination of the Guidelines of
Socialist Realism, which prescribed how writers should sing the praises
of the "best of all possible worlds" of the state Utopia, we look at a
selection of political novels that demonstrate the reality of a dystopic
nightmare beyond the facade of the state Utopia, a genuinely dystopic
society that complies in its essential features with most of the charac-
teristics we have just delineated in the hypothetical societies of the

Western classics of dystopian fiction.

The central thesis of this book, then, is based on the observation

that in those works that the Western reader tends to regard as the
classics of dystopian fiction, authors envisage a monster state in the
future, a society that reflects the writers' fear of the possible develop-
ment of totalitarian dictatorship in their own societies. By contrast
with this body of literature, after Zamiatin the Eastern and Central
European works of dystopia - written about, against, and under

totalitarian dictatorship - present us with a nightmare world not as a
phantasmagorical vision of the future but as an accurate reflection of
the "worst of all possible worlds" experienced as a historical reality.

i 8

Dystopian Fiction East and West

Because the political criticism behind the dystopian impulse in the

East in this period deals with various phases of the nightmare of
historical reality, the works to be explored will be arranged in chro-
nological order according to the historical period they deal with. Part 2
concentrates on the period between 1919 and the 1950s. We begin
with three accounts of the nightmarish phases of revolutionary terror
in Russia between 1919 and 1921: Victor Serge's Conquered City,
Vladimir Zazubrin's "The Chip," and Alexander Rodionov's Choco-
late. We proceed to fiction dealing with the Stalinist revolution of forced
collectivization, forced industrialization, and the Moscow show trials
of the 1930s in Andrei Platonov's Foundation Pit, Anatolij Ribakov's

Children of the Arbat, and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. We

turn then to novels about the frightening rise of Russian chauvinism
during the Second World War and a return to terror in the post-war
years, in Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, Abram Tertz Sinyavski's

The Trial Begins, and Juliy Daniel's Moscow Speaking.

Part 3 deals with the experience of four countries in the Soviet bloc

up to the late 1980s. The years of terror in Poland, Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia between 1949 and 1953, and during the recurring
crackdowns of the post-Stalin era, are represented by Jerzy Andzrejewski's
Inquisitors and Appeal, Marek Hlasko's Graveyard, by the short
fiction of Ladislav Fuks' Mr Mundstock and The Cremator, and by
short stories and feuilletons of Istvan Orkeny, Ludwik Vaculik, and
Slavomir Mrozek. Three plays from Czechoslovakia represent the
public theatricals of show trials and the satirical treatment of these
trials on the stage, in Ivan Klima's The Castle, Petr Karvas's The Big

Wig, and Vaclav Havel's Memorandum. The spiral of entropy that

follows the spiral of terror is represented in Hungarian Tibor Dery's
Mr G.A. in X, Polish Tadeusz Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse, and
Russian Alexander Zinoviev's Radiant Future. Finally, we look briefly
at the reappearance of dystopia as speculative fiction with its futuristic
structure of two time-planes in Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042

(1987), Vassily Aksyonov's The Island of Crimea (1983), Gyorgy Dalos's
1985 (1990), and Gyorgy Moldova's Hitler in Hungary (1972, 1992).

No doubt, all these are works of dystopian fiction because they

display most of the thematic and generic elements we have observed
in the six classics of the genre; they describe a hell on earth, an absurd,
death-bound social-political system where the elite deliberately con-
spires against its own people, against the most universal principles of
justice, with emphasis on nighmarish rigged trials, with make-believe
accusations followed by all-too-real sentences to hard labour or death.
There is also an interaction between Utopian and dystopian perspec-
tives within the same work, as the writer - up to the 1980s, a critic

Dystopia West, Dystopia East 19

from within - struggles to maintain his faith in socialism against an
allegedly socialist system. We also detect, in many cases, the interaction
between satirical and tragic perspectives.

There are, however, four striking differences between the Western

classics of dystopia as a speculative genre and the dystopian fiction of
the East.

THE FATE OF THE WRITER AND THE MANUSCRIPT

The first differ-

ence relates to the fate of the writer and the manuscript. Many of these
works revealing the shocking reality behind state propaganda were
suppressed for decades; they could not be published unless the authors

managed to publish them underground (samizdat) or abroad (tamiz-
dat). Some of the authors were sent into exile; others were imprisoned,
sent to labour camps, or even executed.

THE VANISHING OF SPECULATIVE FICTION WITH THE TWO TIME-

PLANES The second thing that strikes us immediately in this body of
literature written under dictatorship is that for over sixty years - that

is, between Zamiatin's We, written in 1920, and Aksyonov's and Voi-
novich's novels, written in the 1980s - the dystopian impulse did not
seek its expression through works of speculative fiction. What are the
reasons for this conspicuous absence of the Western model of the futur-
istic-speculative genre, with its distinction between two time-planes?

The first and most obvious reason is Stalin's "fantasectomy," his

banning of works of speculative literature after 192.9. As Zamiatin
anticipated this in the "fantasectomy" of his protagonist at the end of
We, as soon as "Stalin consolidated his power as the only legitimate

source of Utopian thought, he undertook his 'anti-fantasy project.'"
His role as the Masterbuilder of the New Man was parallelled by that
of the Masterdreamer, for "a crucial element of the cult of Stalin was

his alleged ability to see far across the land and into the future. How
could mere writers share his vision?" (It is interesting to note that at
the emergence of another omniscient dictator, Hitler, speculative liter-
ature in Germany, including science fiction, "went through an almost

identical transformation at the same time."

13

)

But does such a political climate provide sufficient explanation to our

question about the paucity of works with a futuristic structure in our
period? We should first of all rule out the hypothesis that this paucity
could have anything to do with national temperament or the literary

traditions in these countries to which Philip Roth has referred as the

"other Europe."

14

Prior to the introduction of Stalin's totalitarian rule,

Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had a rich tradition of futuristic
speculation or fantasy.

15

As for Russia, when Zamiatin wrote We, he

20 Dystopian Fiction East and West

had already completed another speculative novel with a futuristic struc-
ture and was also in a position to have read numerous other Russian
novels of the previous generation that demonstrate this structure.

16

However, when a Russian translation of We appeared in Czechoslova-
kia in 19x7, although without the author's consent, Zamiatin aroused

Stalin's relentless anger against any kind of speculative literature as
inherently subversive to what Stites calls Stalin's own "anti-utopian Uto-
pia." In 1931 Zamiatin was sent into exile: other writers of speculative
fiction were punished more severely.

Yet Stalin's ban on the publication of speculative literature does not

fully explain why writers stopped writing in this mode. After all,
speculative literature was not the only type of literature suppressed by

Stalin; any work that could be construed as directly or indirectly
critical of the state Utopia could come to the same fate. As we can see
from the fate of the writers in our selection, works of the dystopian
impetus without the futuristic time-frame were also repressed, their
writers persecuted, and yet there was no dearth of works of this nature.

To find a second and probably equally important reason why no

dystopias with a speculative, futuristic structure were written in the
period in question we should probably assume that the imaginative
process functions in a certain way when projecting the fear of catas-
trophe into the future, and in a different way when responding to
catastrophe experienced as reality. After the 192.0s the nightmare in

the dystopian fiction in the East is no longer connected with a terrifying
future that an author could warn readers about: it is simply a statement

about the way things are, rendered most of the time through emotional
understatement. In other words, at a time when an entire society seems
to be labouring in the throes of an enormous fantasmagoria about the
future, it may be quite natural that the writer's criticism of this society

avoids the form of speculative fantasy, advocating instead the truthful
examination of the flaws of the present and the past.

A DYSTOPIAN IMPETUS COMPATIBLE WITH SEVERAL GENRES While

the dystopian impulse in the Western tradition has been framed by the
novelistic tradition of speculative fiction, the dystopian impulse in the

Soviet bloc in this period was not bound by any particular genre. One
finds significant presentations of dystopian themes in grotesques and
allegories as well as in realistic fiction, and these may take the form of
novels, short stories, feuilletons, cinema, and drama. In fact, in Czech-
oslovakia, Hungary, and Poland the dystopian impulse in drama seems

as strong as if not even stonger than in the novel; see, for example,
Mrozek's Striptease or Tango, Rozewicz's The Old Woman Broods,
and Istvan Orkeny's Family Toth, or Pisti in the Torrent of Blood -

Dystopia West, Dystopia East 21

probably a subject rich enough for an independent study. This study,
however, examines three representatives of the "Kafkaesque" theatre
of the absurd in Czechoslovakia, one of the countries where "the absur-
dist playwright is the true realist, while it is the playwright of 'socialist
realism' who deals in grotesque dreams."

17

THE REPRESENTATION OF MALE-FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS IN DYS-
TOPIAN

F I C T I O N

Finally, another interesting difference between

these two bodies of literature is in the different significance the writer
attributes to romantic love in the protagonist's predicament. In the
Western model Zamiatin, Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury present the
protagonist's awakening to the dystopic nature of his society through
his awakening to a kind of love forbidden by the regime. Falling in
love with a woman who offers affection, passion, or simply an intimate
bond is essential to the protagonist's awakening to his private universe,

an essential step in building resistance against the regime. That such
a dystopian romance is doomed to failure by the regime is an essential
feature of the plot in the classics of dystopian fiction. By contrast,
sexual love or a search for greater intimacy does not seem to play a
significant role in our selection of dystopian works from Eastern and
Central Europe in this period. It seems here that the protagonist's (and

the writer's) central, almost exclusive passion is political. Also, unlike
the literary developments in the West, dystopian fiction in the Soviet
bloc seems an almost exclusively male-centreed genre; female-centred
or feminist dystopias appear only after our period.

18

Further questions arising from the comparison between the dysto-

pian perspectives in these two bodies of literature are explored in the
detailed studies of individual works. As I assume that the dystopian
works written under dictatorship are less well known to the Western
reader, the six Western classics are discussed in two chapters in part 1,
while the discussion of works from the East is considerably longer,
taking up parts 2 and 3.

Before embarking upon the detailed juxtaposition of these two bodies
of literature, let us turn to what I introduced as their first common

characteristic: the notion that a dystopian novel reveals, within its own
framework, the push and pull between Utopian and dystopian perspec-
tives. In the eloquent words of Krishan Kumar, anti-utopia or dystopia

"is one side of a dialogue of the self within individuals who have been

indelibly stamped with the Utopian temperament.'"

9

Kumar does not

go into detail about this temperament, and there is, most likely, a whole
range of characteristics one could deduce by examining the works begin-
ning with Zamiatin, Orwell, and Huxley and ending with Voinovich.

2.z Dystopian Fiction East and West

Within the framework of this study, however, the next two chapters

concentrate on what I suggest are probably two of the most prominent
characteristics of this utopian-dystopian temperament: a passionate,
quasi-religious concern with the salvation of humanity through history,
and an equally passionate preoccupation with the concept of the Utopian
pursuit of justice and the radical reversal of this pursuit in dystopia.

Part One

Dystopia West

Kurt Vonnegut

Ray Bradbury

CHAPTER ONE

What is Justice?

The Answers of Utopia,

Tragedy, and Dystopia

"What is truth?" asked Pilate, and did not stay for an answer. Had

he wanted to pursue the mysteries of the truth of divine justice, he
would have entered the grounds of tragedy. Had he had faith in Rome

or Jerusalem as a perfectible society able to achieve earthly justice, he
would have entered the groves of Utopia. Had he not only washed his
hands of searching for truth and justice but also deliberately set out
to create the machinery of injustice, he would have qualified for the
governorship of dystopia in the modern age.

"What is justice?" his pupils asked Socrates, and unlike Pilate he

immediately settled down to give a lengthy lecture on the question -
witness the "lecture notes" of his star pupil, Plato, in the ten books

of The Republic. Early in book z Socrates comes to the conclusion
that we cannot even approach the definition of a just man acting in a
just fashion unless we try to picture something that has clearly never
yet existed, a just society. It is worth noting that it is not in the pursuit
of happiness but in the pursuit of justice that Socrates laid the foun-

dation of a Utopian society, the hypothetical city-state of the Republic.

"What is justice? How should we pursue it?" debates Raphael

Hathloday, the narrator of Thomas More's Utopia, a book that claims

"to match or beat" Plato's Republic "at its own game." Sitting at the

table of Cardinal Morton in the England of the early 1500s, Raphael
debates the connection between crime and punishment. England's legal
system is clearly in a crisis; thieves are hanging from the gallows all

over the country, yet the severity of the punishment does not act as a
deterrent. Raphael points out that in a society where greedy landowners
have forced thousands out of work so that the dispossessed are in turn
forced to steal bread, it is society itself that first makes the thieves and
then, in the name of justice, "very properly" turns them into corpses.
This style of justice, Raphael argues passionately, is the "conspiracy of

26 Dystopia West

the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing
society"; in other words, it is "injustice ... legally described as justice."

1

To avoid the dilemma of such unjust punishment - indeed, to avoid

the need for punishment whatsoever - Raphael offers to relate to
More, his host, practices of a distant island that Raphael has encoun-
tered as a chance visitor. More invites him to do so after lunch, and
thus we are invited along, to enter the Island of Utopia, again not in

pursuit of happiness, but in pursuit of a just society.

In a sense the "good place" of eutopia cannot be fully understood

without its counter-image, the "bad place" of the writer's own time
and place, from whose flaws he would like to escape. In Plato's case,
the Republic is a just society because it promises to construct a system

in which only the true lover of wisdom can rise to the position of ruler,
a society that offers a guarantee against Plato's most painful experience
of blatant injustice, the sentencing of Athens' finest philosopher,
Socrates, to exile or death.

As for More's Utopia, the image of the world "as it should be"

cannot become compelling without our counter-image of the flawed
world of reality around us. Although More completed the book of the
ideal place in 1515, in 1516 he still felt the need to write another book

dealing with the acute problems of the England of his time. It is the
latter work he turned into book 1, so that the questions raised by the
grave injustice in society "as is" could be answered by the institutions
of a just society "as it should be" in book 2. (One wonders if the just
society of Utopia would also have enshrined due process of law had
More in 1516 been able to envisage the rigged trials and executions
typical of an age of despotism to which he himself fell victim a mere
two decades after writing his Utopia.) In a sense, then, the entire notion

of a hypothetical society ruled by justice is predicated on the injustice
in the "bad place," the real world the writer intends to condemn or
criticize. Behind the well-groomed gardens of the hypothetical Utopia
is the dark silhouette of the real gallows with thieves hanging "all over
the place ... as many as twenty on a single gallows."

1

And behind

More, engaged with Raphael in jovial talk about justice, emerges the
dark shadow of his own future trial and execution. Just so, juxtaposed
to the serene image of Socrates, surrounded by his admiring pupils
deep in conversation about a just society, is the stark scene of the

"Apologia," Socrates surrounded once more by his pupils, struggling

with the injustice of the sentence meted out at his trial: the drinking
of hemlock or exile from Athens.

These dystopian images of unfair trial and cruel retribution became

central to the further development of the utopian-dystopian discourse
in our time, but in its modern rendition the age-old concept of the

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia 27

"bad place" has turned into a genre of its own.

3

The new genre is still

impelled by the criticism of satire directed at the writer's own society,
just as Utopian fiction is, but the strategies of the satire are different.

While More's Utopia implies a reversal of our flawed, irrational, unjust
society and the world of Utopia, classics of dystopian fiction, such as

We Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four offer a definite sense

of continuity between the flawed world of the present and the even
more profoundly flawed, monstrous world of the hypothetical future,
where our society's errors against justice and reason become a totali-
tarian dictatorship of organized injustice.

While the mirror of Utopian fiction functions as an enthusiastic

invitation to us as denizens of the flawed world of reality to enter the
unflawed one, the dark mirror of dystopian fiction functions as a
deterrent, a warning that we should not allow the still curable illness
of our present world to turn into the abhorrent pathologies of the

world of the future.

U T O P I A V E R S U S T R A G E D Y V E R S U S D Y S T O P I A

Having observed that Utopian and dystopian fiction have a common
ground in satire and that both criticize the injustice and irrationality
of the existing social system, we should find a further distinction
between the two genres. Utopia and dystopia reveal their significant
difference from each other in their relationship to the tragic vision and

to the sense of justice characteristic of the genre of tragedy.

"Why is there no justice? Why does the good man suffer?" we hear

the tragic hero cry as he struggles with his fate. On a cosmic, meta-
physical level, this has been a crucial question for the moral imagina-
tion ever since antiquity. Do we not hear Job's agonized cry challenging
God's justice echoing from the Old Testament? "Doth it please thee to
oppress, that thou shouldst despise the work of thy hands, and shine

upon the counsel of the wicked?" (Job 9-11, 3). Why is suffering and
humiliation visited upon the righteous? Why is it not the wicked whom
God chooses to punish or reprimand?

In Oedipus Rex Sophocles raises the question of justice as something

essential to the definition of being human. When examined from a
cosmic perspective, the question of divine justice remains as mysterious
here as in the Book of Job. Having appointed himself judge and detec-
tive, Oedipus is made to discover that he is the criminal he has been
searching for; he is "the cursed polluter" of Thebes, his own kingdom.

As he gets closer and closer to this shattering revelation, he cries out:

Oh gods, what have you plotted against me?" Still, as far as human

|

;

justice goes, once he has established his own identity, Oedipus takes

28 Dystopia West

his punishment into his own hands. When he finally confirms that the
prophecy he has feared all his life has been fulfilled and the man he
killed was his father and the woman he married his mother, he blinds
himself. When asked by the Chorus who is responsible for this horrible

deed, he blurts out, "Apollo, my friends, Apollo - but my hands - I
did it." It was the Sun god Apollo - that is, a superhuman force - that
caused the chain of events that culminated in this deed, yet it is he,
Oedipus, who takes personal responsibility for his action and takes the
instrument of human justice into his own hands. In this scene we have

a distinct sense that it is precisely the act of assuming individual respon-
sibility that elevates the victim of Fate to the status of tragic hero, that
by claiming responsibility for his actions, the pawn of Fate confers
upon himself the dignity of the human being.

Still, what it takes to become or to stay human is not a criterion

necessarily self-evident to every human being. In the resolution of

Oedipus Rex there is a contradiction between the justice perceived by

the Chorus and the justice perceived by the tragic hero. Unknown to
the former, there is a new way of seeing that awaits the self-blinded
Oedipus: at the very depth of his suffering he understands that it was
not for nothing that the gods singled him out for his horrible fate:

"And yet I know, not age, nor sickness, nor common accident can end

my life; I was not snatched from death that once, unless to be preserved
for some more awful [awesome] destiny" (1456-60). In contrast to

Oedipus, the Chorus remain blind to the meaning of Oedipus's self-
punishment to the very end, because they are of necessity blind to his
new insight into a higher, a transcendent system of justice, albeit a
postponed one.

There is a similar interaction between Job, when he challenges God

before accepting his predicament unconditionally, and his three friends,
who come allegedly to console him. Although surrounded by a chorus
of "friends," Job and Oedipus must struggle alone with the mystery of
divine justice, a justice not immediately apparent because it is trans-
posed or "postponed" beyond the realm of human, social justice. With-
out this mystery we would probably have no sense of transcendence,
that unique illumination of tragic knowledge that is mysterious because
it emerges in spite of, or precisely through the darkness of tragic loss
- a perception essential to the sense of tragic catharsis or purification.

Suffering from the cruelty of his two elder daughters as the conse-

quence of his own act of injustice against his youngest, Cordelia, King
Lear declares that he is "more sinned against than sinning" and becomes
so obsessed with trials and imaginary seats of judgment that he goes
out of his mind. He will find peace and the return of his sanity in his
reunion with Cordelia, when he comes to experience the meaning of her

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia

2 9

true forgiveness and reclaims the natural bond of love between father
and child. This bond restores the continuity of the disrupted Chain of
Being that is for Shakespeare the demonstration of divine order and
justice. Of course, it is after this reconciliation that Cordelia is mur-
dered, and Lear dies of a broken heart because of it. The survivors are
left with the poignant but unanswerable questions of tragedy: "Is this
the promised end? Or image of that horror?" (v.iii.263-4) Even in this
ostensibly pre-Christian play Shakespeare feels that the unpredictable

mysteries of divine justice that allow the innocent to suffer can be
addressed only by reference to the "promised end" of the Last Judgment.

The Utopian vision is contrapuntal to the tragic vision. In Utopia we

are asked to disregard the cosmic dimensions of tragedy and the
exceptional personality of a tragic hero and move on to the concerns
of the chorus, the here and now of social and moral justice. Indeed,
Plato expels the tragedian from his Utopia. The education of the young
guardians in the Republic has no room for the nourishing of the tragic
emotions of pity and fear: "When we listen to a passage of Homer, or
one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is
drawing out his sorrows in long oration, or weeping, or smiting his
breast, [we] delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at

the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most."

4

Well aware of their power, the Republic exiles its best poets lest the

feelings of "pleasure and pain [become] the rulers of the State" instead
of "law and reason." Plato's guardian has no time for tragedy, where

"the forces which shape or destroy our lives live outside the prove-

nance of reason and justice." Therefore, it is not by accident that in
the twentieth century's most potent Utopian experiment, the Soviet
Union, Education Commissar Lunacharsky announced that "one of
the defining qualities of a communist society would be the absence of
tragic drama."

5

When Gorky, one of the founding fathers of Socialist

Realism, was asked about the possibility of tragic accidents in the
Communist future, he expressed his invincible conviction that in the

perfect world of Communism, tragic accidents would no longer occur.

6

George Steiner points out that "the Marxist world view, even more

explicitly than the Christian, admits of error, anguish, and temporary
defeat, but not of ultimate tragedy. Despair is a mortal sin against
Marxism no less than it is against Christ." It also follows from Marx's
and Engels's pride in the scientific principles of their system that they
deny the mystery connected with the blind necessity of tragedy:

Necessity is blind only when we don't understand it." In its denial

or a tragic ending in the cosmic scheme of things, says Frye, "Chris-
tianity ... sees tragedy as an episode in the divine comedy, the larger
scheme of redemption and resurrection. The sense of tragedy as a

3°

Dystopia West

prelude to comedy seems almost inseparable from anything explicitly

Christian."

7

Similarly, Steiner argues, "the Marxist conception of his-

tory is a secular commedia. Mankind is advancing toward the justice,
equality and leisure of a classless society."

8

Steiner's parallel between

Christianity and Marxism also draws attention to the religious, escha-
tological aura with which the inevitably paradisiac future in Commu-
nism is imbued, in spite of the allegedly secular, materialist approach
Marx takes to history.

D Y S T O P I A A S O R G A N I Z E D I N J U S T I C E

We have noted that the Utopian vision is diametrically opposed to the
vision of tragedy. We should now also take into account that Utopia,
with its belief in the possibility of establishing justice in society, is also

opposed to dystopian fiction, a genre that, I suggest, describes a society
characterized by not only occasional errors in the execution of justice
but by a machinery for the deliberate miscarriage of justice. What is
then the relationship between dystopian fiction and tragedy, each of
them a counterpoint to the vision of Utopia?

To begin to answer this question it is necessary to examine the

parallels between the tragic hero and the protagonist of dystopian
fiction. If "any realistic notion of tragic drama must start with the fact
of catastrophe," it would be useless to look for the principles of human
justice in the interaction between the human being and the forces of
the supernatural. "Oedipus does not get back his eyes or his spectre

... There is no use in asking for a rational explanation or mercy. Things

are as they are; unrelenting and absurd. We are punished far in excess
of our guilt."

9

By contrast, in his definition of tragedy Northrop Frye

argues that we should "recognize in tragedy a mimesis of sacrifice," a
definition that to me implies a justice different from social justice,
where the "inscrutable tragic hero" becomes our pharmakos, who
sacrifices himself for the community - or for the reader or the audience
- so that "with his fall, a greater world beyond, which his gigantic
spirit had blocked out, becomes for a moment visible, but there is also
a sense of the mystery and remoteness of that world."

10

Demonstrating the problematic relationship between human and

divine justice, tragedy makes us examine anew the conventional
notions of good and evil and the very concept of retribution. I suggest
that there is a significant structural-thematic connection but also a
difference between tragedy and modern dystopian fiction. The under-
lying situation in both is a trial and the threat of cruel retribution. At
the beginning of Oedipus Rex Oedipus announces that he will act as
detective and judge to find Laios's murderer. At the end he has to face

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia 31

his self-announced punishment. In Antigone, King Lear, Hamlet,

Macbeth, even in Romeo and Juliet, the threat of trial and retribution
are the central motivators of the plot and also lead to its climax.

Trial and retribution also take pride of place in dystopian fiction. In

Zamiatin's We, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, and Bradbury's Fahren-
heit 451 the narrative is "framed" by two trials: the trial and punish-

ment of a subversive witnessed by the protagonist at the beginning,
and the protagonist's own trial and punishment at the end. Yet there
is a significant difference between the role of trial and punishment in
tragedy and in dystopian fiction.

This difference is twofold: it relates first to the machinery of justice

and second to the protagonist's response to retribution. We have
suggested that neither Shakespeare's nor Sophocles' tragic view of
earthly justice implies the denial of the very concept of justice. Even

if Oedipus does not regain his sight and kingdom, the moment of his
tragic fall, his peripeteia, also coincides with a new recognition, a new
understanding of his fate, a new kind of spiritual insight (just as
Gloucester in King Lear understands that he gained new understanding

only after he was blinded, declaring: "I stumbled when I saw"). In this
sense, in spite of the tragic loss that is fundamental to tragedy, we have
also to note the double action in tragic drama, the material loss of

light balanced by a spiritual or psychological illumination or the
purification of sacrifice: "Man is ennobled by the vengeful spite of the
gods. It does not make him innocent, but it hallows him as if he had

passed through flame."

11

In dystopian fiction the protagonist's trial results not in the post-

ponement but in the denial of justice, its deliberate miscarriage. The
central character with whom we tend to identify is an individual
courageous enough to stand up against an elite ruling through a semi-
divine leader, who is responsible for the enslavement of the population,
for a deliberate conspiracy against the welfare of his own people. In

this society trials can have only one result: no accused is ever acquitted.

But are we expected to have the sense of spiritual uplift characteristic

of tragedy when we read of the tragic loss endured by Zamiatin's D-503,
by Huxley's John the Savage, or by Orwell's Winston Smith? Given

the nature of the punishment following their trial, none of these
protagonists is in a position to reach a moment of recognition or new
insight, and thus to undergo an experience of catharsis. D-503 is
lobotomized; the Savage commits suicide; and Winston Smith is tor-

tured physically and mentally until he undergoes a personality change
comparable in its effects to lobotomy. Neither do they fulfil the fate
of the tragic hero, who is able to sacrifice himself for the good of the

community. The dystopian ruler makes sure that the protagonists'

32 Dystopia West

revolt is defeated and his name erased from the memory of the
enslaved, benumbed population.

If there is a moment of catharsis implied in the protagonist's predic-

ament, it is there only for the reader who has finished the narrative,
and it is contained in an insight more in the nature of the cerebral
recognition accompanying political satire than the emotional catharsis

of tragedy. Dystopian satire has a primarily social message, a didactic
intent to address the Ideal Reader's moral sense and reason as it applies
to our place in society. Consequently, as a fundamentally cerebral genre,
satire makes a more direct appeal to the rational thought-process than
does tragedy, and the reader's catharsis must be appropriate to the
cerebral nature of the genre. The catharsis peculiar to dystopian satire

is probably best demonstrated in Nineteen Eighty-four:

"What happened had to happen" is the recognition reached by the end of
Oedipus Rex or Hamlet. Only by confronting the darkness of evil and suffering

can we liberate ourselves from it. Liberation comes in tragedy as a result, after
the catastrophe. In satire the catharsis consists of another kind of recognition,
and I suggest that it is the sense of relief that comes from a revelation
accomplished by the force of reason; it consists of the recognition that we are

still before the catastrophe, and hence in possession of the freedom to avert
it. When reading Goldstein's Book and the Dictionary of Newspeak, dealing
with the past and future of Oceania respectively, we are reminded that Winston's
story, which we have just been reading, has not happened yet. Unlike Winston,
we still have the freedom to shape the future according to our higher under-

standing and free choice."

11

Such a distancing mechanism between the protagonist and the reader
may take a variety of forms but is equally important in all the
dystopian novels that follow the classical Western structure. However
compelling the protagonist's personal fate in the novel, we are not
expected to identify with him the way we are to identify with the hero
of tragedy (an identification that would form the precondition of our
tragic catharsis). Also, instead of concentrating exclusively on the
protagonist's personal fate in the dramatic present, we are asked to

scrutinize the historical forces that led from his society's past to the
nightmare society in his present.

Since the dystopian fiction of Eastern and Central Europe deals with

the nightmare society without the distancing mechanism of the hypoth-
esis implied in speculative literature that projects the nightmare into

our future, here our "speculation" is focused directly on the question:
How did the Utopian dream of socialism, shared by millions, turn into
a nightmare of a dystopic, ultimately dysfunctional society? How did

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia

33

the Utopian promise of universal justice implied in what Lenin called
the "radiant future" of Communism turn into the organized injustice
of totalitarian dictatorship?

T O T A L I T A R I A N D I C T A T O R S H I P :

T H E M I S C A R R I A G E O F J U S T I C E

Directly or indirectly, both versions of dystopian literature to be exam-
ined in this study raise the question: Why does the elite that came to
power with the Utopian promise of universal justice end up establishing
a system based on the deliberate miscarriage of justice? And how long

can the elite justify this aberration to itself?

IDEOLOGICAL THINKING

As Karl Popper introduces this dilemma, undoubtedly "Marxism pre-
dicted and tried actively to further a development culminating in an
ideal Utopia that knows no political or economic coercion; the state
has withered away, each person co- operates freely in accordance with
his abilities, and all his needs are satisfied."

13

How could such a

prediction lead to the totalitarian police state?

In the light of the totalitarian dictatorships of our century, Karl

Popper, Milovan Djilas, J.L. Talmon, and Hannah Arendt (among many
others) speculate about the surprising similarities between certain
aspects of Utopian thought and the ideology conducive to totalitarian
rule. According to Milovan Djilas, "every tyranny begins with some
absolute truths about man and society,"

14

and it has been often repeated

that "whoever aspires to the articulation of final absolute truth about
man and society has already planted the seed of tyranny."

IJ

In Karl

Popper's definition, utopianism means that "rational political action
must be based upon a more or less clear and detailed description or
blueprint of our ideal state, and ... of the historical path that leads
towards this goal."

16

Inherent in such a "blueprint," according to Arendt, are the conse-

quences of "ideological thinking" in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia.
Mie names three specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to
all ideological thinking:

First, m their claim to total explanation, ideologies have the tendency to
explain not what is, but what becomes, what is born and passes away ... It
promises the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present,

nd the reliable prediction of the future. Secondly [it] becomes independent of

experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a question

34

Dystopia West

of something that has just come to pass. Hence it becomes emancipated from
the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a "truer" reality
concealed behind all perceptible things, ... requiring a sixth sense that enables
us to become aware of it ... Thirdly ... it orders facts into an absolutely logical
procedure [that proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm

of reality (my italics).

17

As if he wanted to illustrate these points, in Nineteen Eighty-four

Orwell dedicates the last third of the novel to Winston's trial, where
O'Brien demonstrates the Party's absolute, megalomaniacal certainty
about its total knowledge of past, present, and future, that crazy "iron
consistency" of logic that is, like a psychosis, entirely "emancipated
from reality." O'Brien also insists on Winston's developing that "sixth
sense" Orwell calls "doublethink," which would make him see how
two plus two may make four or five, depending on the Party's latest
position on the matter.

The entire narrative of Darkness at Noon deals with methods of

interrogation as an exercise in an insane logic of iron consistency. Inter-
rogating Rubashov, Gletkin demonstrates the same schizophrenic

"sixth sense" by taking into account and denying Rubashov's innocence

at the same time, a feat of ideological thinking that got Gletkin his job
in the first place. Gletkin's absolute conviction that the Party's predic-
tions about the future are irrefutable gives him the strength to denounce
his boss and rival, Ivanov, and annihilate the defendant, a member of
the Party opposition whose "heretical" views should be eradicated.
Ultimately, it is O'Brien's and Gletkin's invincible faith in the historical
predictions of their ideologies that justifies the most violent "suppres-

sion of criticism and the annihilation of all opposition."

18

What also follows from this faith is "the affirmation of the wisdom

and foresight of Utopian planners, of the Utopian engineers who design
and execute the Utopian blueprint ... [They] must in this way become
omniscient as well as omnipotent. They become gods."

19

The specula-

tive fiction of We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four

describes the grotesque and sinister worship of the Utopian planner as
deity. This phenomenon, in a directly satirical form, is also central to
the dystopian critiques of the worship of the "Big Man in the city" in
Platonov's Foundation Pit, of the bloodthirsty Master in Tertz's The

Trial Begins, and of No. I in Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

IN THE WAKE OF VIOLENCE -

PERPETRATING VIOLENCE

Almost all our examples of speculative dystopian fiction describe the

origin of dictatorships in the violence and chaos of a cataclysmic war

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia

35

(long centuries of struggle in We and Brave New World; the war

conducted with the help of the atom bomb in the fifties in Nineteen
Eighty-four; a Third World War in Player Piano). The roots of total-
itarianism, an unprecedented form of government that made its first
appearance in our century, according to Arendt, should be located in
protracted periods of violence (the First World War, revolutions, civil wars)
that created a crisis for the masses who lost stability, traditions, their
sense of personal connectedness with the world. They accepted, there-
fore, the vague, holistic ideology articulated by a potentially semi-divine
leader, who "must eradicate the existing institutions and traditions. He
must purify, purge, expel, banish and kill."

io

TOTALITARIANISM:

THE DUALITY OF LAW AND LAWLESSNESS

Yet totalitarian regimes, in spite of being born of violence and aiming
to perpetrate violence, are not essentially lawless, even if their "law-
fulness" has little to do with any traditional concept of justice. The
protagonists in We, Brave New World, or Nineteen Eighty-four are
not simply killed or liquidated: they are brought to trial and sentenced
by "due process." As Karl Dietrich Bracher observes, "the coincidence

of radically arbitrary acts and apparent due process, manifested also
in the facade of the legitimate constitutional state, is characteristic both
of Hitlerism and Stalinism. Order and chaos, stability and revolution,
are joined in the totalitarian 'dual state.'"

11

In Nineteen Eighty-four Orwell emphasizes such a duality between

strict, Party-enforced discipline and the unbridled ferocity of the Parsons
children, who set fire to the skirt of a market woman for wrapping
her wares in a newspaper with Big Brother's portrait printed on it. In
fact, acts of ferocious violence against the "enemy" (and the dutiful
and dogged pursuit of an ever-expanding circle of "enemies") become

proof of the child's unfailing vigilance, an important part of Party
discipline. In a sense, then, the trial and execution of the enemy, the
outsider, becomes an essential part of the dystopian system. It is the
strictest law that determines who is and who is not within the bound-
aries of the law. This is the great leap backward to the pre-civilized
state where the Other, the alien and the subversive, is beyond the pale,
to be outlawed and demonized. In this sense, I suggest, societies can
oe characterized as dystopic when the prime function of the law is to
denne lawlessness and to segregate those inside the magic circle, who
are to be placed under the law, from those who are thrust outside as

nemies, demons, scapegoats. Such duality between law and lawless-

ness was equally characteristic of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes. The
One-party system of Germany justified its violence by its self-assigned

36 Dystopia West

function as the executor of the "higher" Law of Nature; in the USSR
by its function as the executor of the "higher" Law of History. The
leader of the party in both cases functioned as the head of the state

religion, where "justice" was preserved for members of an inner circle,
while those outside the circle were declared "outside the law," stripped
of their rights and possessions, and deported and exterminated "justi-
fiably," under due process of such laws.

Grossman's Life and Fate includes a particularly dramatic illustra-

tion of this process in the life of an old Jewish doctor, who as soon

as the Germans occupy the Ukraine in 1941 finds out that from one
day to another she has been stripped of her human rights. Suddenly
she is treated by her neighbours and former patients in her own house
as if she were no longer alive. The neighbours discuss in her presence
how to divide up her furniture among themselves, and simply tell the

elderly woman by way of explanation, "You are outside the law." As
for "outlawing" the class enemy, Platonov's Foundation Pit presents
memorable scenes of how all the peasants stigmatized as "kulaks" are

stripped of their property and rights, and entire communities, young
and old, men, women, and children, are sent without food and warm
clothing to almost certain death in Siberia. Both victims and onlookers
watch passively this process of "revolutionary justice" as if witnessing
the enactment of the Law of History.

The ideology that introduced the notion of the racially inferior in

Germany or of the class enemy in the

USSR

acted like a myth to justify

depriving large groups of citizens of the protection of the law. In both
cases people were designated victims by birth. Had one been born

"racially inferior" in Hitler's dictatorship, or a child of the bourgeoisie,

the kulaks, or cosmopolitan "class enemies" under Stalin's rule, there
was simply nothing one could do to change that status. The continuous

sacrifice of ever more scapegoats and the identifying of ever more cat-
egories of scapegoats as "enemies" were essential to the state machinery.

T H E R O L E O F T H E T R I A L

I N T H E S T A T E R E L I G I O N

In fact, all six classic examples of dystopian speculative fiction - We,
Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-four, Fahrenheit 4 5 1 , Player
Piano, and The Handmaid's Tale - take us into a world that, we are
shocked to realize, is ruled by a primitive religion based on human

sacrifice, a clear regression to a pre-civilized, quasi-mythical state. The
primal scene of each particular state religion is acted out as the theatre
of a recurring ritual: an imaginary crime has been committed in the
past by a variety of real or entirely fictitious "enemies," and the same
crime fixed on an ever-widening circle of scapegoats calls for recurring

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia

37

acts of retribution by forces of the "Saviour" or "Messiah," the head
of the dictatorship. In Oceania this primal scene is acted out in the
annually scheduled Hateweeks, and on a daily basis in the ritual of

t

(j

e

"Two-Minute Hate." The public trials, with their surreal air of

phantasmagoric charges and even more phantasmagorical confessions,
fulfil the same function.

Except for transplanting the surreal practices of totalitarianism from

the USSR to England, Orwell here does not really take the liberty of
exaggeration or distortion that often denotes the imaginative leap of
satire. Like medieval morality plays or theological debates staged by
the Inquisition, the trials in the USSR had indeed the combined function
of religious theatre, political propaganda, and psychological safety

valve, releasing the frustration of the masses, who, in the words of
Koestler, were no longer allowed to "judge" events by their own
individual assessment but were encouraged to "condemn" the enemy
already sentenced to be executed. Historically, "the purge trials of the

1930s were not only devices to rid Stalin of real and suspected enemies,

but also dramatized rituals familiar from revolutionary experience. In

the Civil War, the authorities had staged trials in absentia of Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, of literacy, the louse, drunkenness,
kulaks, landlords, Mensheviks, Christian and Jewish gods, and vene-
real disease. In the mock trial of the White leader Baron Wrangler, the
actor was made to confess, tell conflicting stories, and help convict
himself in the presence of 10,000 veterans of the Red Army.""

It is as if the sheer repetition of trials and executions was to convince

the masses - all of them potential accused - of the legitimacy of the
regime as an organized, and therefore also civilized, machine. At the
same time, the chain-reaction of show trials in the thirties and early
fifties also acted as a continuous warning that if even yesterday's
leaders of the Party could be accused, tried, and executed, nobody

could feel safe - a psychology of terror also well illustrated in the
novels dealing with dystopic societies in Eastern and Central Europe.
Ribakov's The Children of the Arbat, Koestler's Darkness at Noon,
Tertz's The Trial Begins, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Andrzejewski's
The Inquisitors render the nightmare atmosphere of purges, trials, and
mass arrests with a compelling force that combines the power of
documentary with the passion of imaginative fiction, bearing witness

to a society "as is" and "as it should not be."

TOTALITARIANISM: A D V A N C E D SCIENCE

A N D T H E B A R B A R I S M O F T H E S T O N E A G E

Underlying this duality of law and lawlessness in totalitarian dictator-
snip is the duality of modern methods of technology and the regressive

38 Dystopia West

acts of a pre-civilized, prehistoric mentality. It has been observed, for
example, that at the beginning of his regime Hitler delighted in evoking
in the population a shocking sense of regression: while boasting of the
most advanced war technology, he reverted to having his opponents
beheaded with an axe - a conspicuously medieval form of punishment,
no doubt to create the shock effect of the barbaric, the archetypal
power of the state as a cruel father. In his Repentance, an incisive film

satire rendering the dictator's personality as a composite figure of
Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, Georgian director Abuladze emphasizes
the contrast between the sophisticated intelligentsia in Grusia and the
Stone Age appearance of the helmeted, club-wielding state police who
come to drag victims away from their homes.

The propensity of Nazism to combine the most advanced technology

with regression to a prehistoric, barbaric past was observed by Orwell
in 1941, when he pointed out that H.G. Wells's "equation of science

with common sense does not really hold good. The areoplane, which
was looked forward to as a civilizing influence but in practice has
hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that
fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far
more barbarous." Orwell makes it clear that there is no point in
looking for a "rational" or "common sense" explanation of political

behaviour in an age of fascism. No doubt, "much of what Wells has
imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The
order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the
concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas
appropriate to the Stone Age."

23

But Wells's prophecy about a sensible, hedonistic Utopia, Orwell

asserts, is contradicted not only by the Nazis but also by the Bolsheviks,
who did not introduce "a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints,
which, like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism
enlivened by witchcraft trials."

24

The regression to the barbarism of the Stone Age or to the medieval

spirit of "witchcraft trials," purges, deportations, and executions
draws upon psychic forces in our "enlightened" twentieth century,
where, Orwell finds, "creatures of the Dark Ages have come marching
into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts
which need a strong magic to lay them."

25

Although none of the six

classics of speculative dystopias deal with this directly, historically the
essential nature of totalitarian dictatorship expresses itself in the con-
centration camps, where the scientific methods of our modern age are
combined with the most regressive psychic forces of barbarism.

In On Revolution and Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt suggests that

series of wars, revolutions, and civil wars create a spiral of violence
and coercion, giving birth to totalitarian dictatorship. Born from

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia

39

violence and determined to perpetrate it by law, totalitarianism fulfils
its essential nature in its glorification and justification of the ultimate
violence, the concentration camp.

Orwell's anatomy of totalitarianism certainly agrees with Arendt's;

still, in spite of showing that the torture chamber in Room 101, a
place "as deep as it was possible to go," constitutes the very essence
of the totalitarian regime, Nineteen Eighty-four does not deal with the
camps behind the Ministry of Love. Among the six works here exam-
ined it is probably Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale that
comes closest to alluding to a particularly harrowing aspect of the
psychological degradation of concentration camp inmates. In the the-
ocracy of Gilead - a regression to the barbarism of a theocracy from
the Middle Ages - the depersonalized women of the community are
allowed, at regular intervals, to become executioners, tearing apart a
randomly selected scapegoat thrown in their way by the military elite,
at the periodically recurring rituals of "salvaging." Clearly, acts of
terror are no longer a means to an end; they have become the very
language in which the elite in power addresses the population. But the
full cycle of totalitarianism, which finds its essential expression in the

camps as a prototype for the rest of the population, who are made to
feel that resistance is impossible, is illustrated most fully not in spec-
ulative fiction but in works offering the historical veracity of realism,
such as Vassily Grossman's description of both Soviet and German
camps in Life and Fate.

WHY DO THE MASSES SUPPORT DICTATORSHIP?

How can we explain the precondition of this regression, the mass
support of both Hitler and Stalin, without which they could not have
stayed in power?

Orwell considered it one of the greatest traumas of our civilization

that the modern individual has lost faith in personal immortality.

26

As

a result, we are left with a vacuum, a psychological need that may easily
be filled by the totalitarian ideology's promise of collective immortality.
People are drawn to the security offered by belonging to the community,
to the implicit promise of sharing in a collective immortality.

It is this yearning for belonging, suggests J.L. Talmon, that explains

the motivation of the multitudes to accept totalitarian dictatorships.
However, he argues, we should realize that "the yearning for salvation
and the love of freedom" cannot be satisfied at the same time. In order
to reject the seductive power of ideology, with its promise of a "final
"solution of all contradictions and conflicts," we have to keep in mind

" i

n C O m p a t i b i l i t y o f t h e i d e a o f a n

all-embracing creed with lib-

erty."^ j

n

their dystopian novels Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell present

40 Dystopia West

the totalitarian state as a primitive state religion that can exert its
power over the true believers because of their initial need to find a
framework for human continuity in the face of death.

As Lifton points out, in a totalitarian system "there is an overall

assumption that there is just one valid mode of being - just one
authentic avenue of immortality - so that an arbitrary line is drawn

between those who do and those who do not possess such rights."

18

O'Brien's explanation of the slogan

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

confirms

Lifton's observation that "collective relationship to immortality
depends upon its collective denial to others." O'Brien explains to

Winston that only those who give up their individuality to "enslave"

themselves to the collective body of the Party can hope to achieve this
privilege, the "freedom" of partaking of the Party's immortality. By
contrast, for proles and other outsiders, their seeming "freedom" from
Party surveillance - "Proles and animals are free" - is simply a sign
of their true slavery.

That the entire concept of immortality is related to exclusion, the

branding, the eventual scapegoating of the outsider, is also noted by
Mircea Eliade, who points out that early cultures made a sharp dis-

tinction between "sacred space" and "unknown and undetermined

space," which they saw inhabited by "demons, ghosts, and foreign-
ers."

19

Totalitarianism goes back to this fundamentally atavistic dis-

tinction between the in-group and the outsider. In Zamiatin's We the
outsider held in contempt is the half-savage inhabitant of the free
world outside the glass dome of the cities of the One State. In Huxley's
Brave New World these outsiders are the people of the Reservation
outside the World State. However, it is in Nineteen Eighty-four where
the pattern of totalitarian scapegoating and its function in the mass

rituals of state religion is worked out in greatest detail. It is by
scapegoating Goldstein and his alleged cohorts that the Inner Party
succeeds in whipping up hatred for "Satan," and then converting this
hate into adulation of Big Brother as "Saviour."

In the dystopic societies of Fahrenheit 451, Player Piano, and The

Handmaid's Tale the ruling elite no longer desire to evoke in citizens
a belief in a party's immortality, or in a quasi-eschatological system of
a particular ideology; they confine their activities to evoking fear in the
population that anyone could be pushed into the circle of the outsiders.

WHAT D Y S T O P I A N F I C T I O N D E F I N E S

AS A G E N U I N E L Y D Y S T O P I C S O C I E T Y

In searching for a definition of a dystopic society, dystopian fiction
looks at totalitarian dictatorship as its prototype, a society that puts

Justice in Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia 41

its whole population continuously on trial, a society that finds its
essence in concentration camps, that is, in disenfranchising and enslav-
ing entire classes of its own citizens, a society that, by glorifying and
justifying violence by law, preys upon itself. Like a dysfunctional family
that maintains its framework but is unable to fulfil its function to
advance the good of each member of the family, who would, in unison,
form a community, dystopian society is what we would today call
dysfunctional; it reveals the lack of the very qualities that traditionally
justify or set the raison d'etre for a community. As a result, dystopian
society is ultimately a moribund, death-bound society that is incapable
of renewal, where the ruling elite cling to their existence as parasites

on their own people, whom they devour in the process.

Of course, what has been asked about Orwell's literary treatment of

totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-four could also be asked about
Arendt's political analysis: How could a system like totalitarianism
survive if it is based on a continuous need for an inexhaustible supply
of scapegoats until it literally devours itself? Arendt anticipates this
question in pointing out that after the First World War, totalitarian
mass movements emerged in several countries, but fully totalitarian
regimes could develop only when the supply of victims appeared to be
inexhaustible: millions within the Soviet Union, and millions combined
from Germany and the occupied countries: "Only where great masses

are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depop-
ulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian move-
ment, at all possible." Consequently, Arendt points out, the "danger
is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian dom-
ination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction. Its danger
is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it - a world which
everywhere seems to have come to an end - before a new beginning
rising from this end has had time to assert itself."

30

All six dystopian novels of speculative literature make an attempt at

a more or less comprehensive understanding of ideological thinking that
shapes and lends legitimacy to total state control so that they can warn
against such developments in their own society. In each novel the essen-
tial goal of the state is to control not only the political behaviour of
human beings and every aspect of their political actions but also to
enter what Orwell called the "few cubic centimetres" within the skull:
the total domination of thoughts and feelings. Although none of these
six novels includes direct reference to concentration camps, ultimately

each regime aims at reducing human beings to inmates, deprived of free

wiU, of a private consciousness and conscience, of any sense of justice.

The dystopian works we have selected from the

USSR,

Poland,

Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, written under dictatorship, seem less

42 Dystopia West

bent on providing a comprehensive analysis of the dynamism of total-
itarianism and more interested in the dramatic rendering of a particular
aspect of their authors' lived experience in a society "as is" and as it

"should not be."

Nevertheless, whether we look at the six novels that warn against the

nightmare state of the future or at the fiction from Eastern and Central
Europe written during the nightmare of totalitarian dictatorship, it
becomes clear that all these novels deal with the prototype of the total-

itarian state, whether in its full force or in a period of its decline. And
all these novels reveal that at the heart of this dystopic society is the
radical and deliberate reversal of the Utopian pursuit for justice.

Questions about the deliberate miscarriage of justice take centre-

stage in the dystopian fiction of Eastern and Central Europe; they
emerge as more vital issues than love between man and woman, parent
and child, the personal relationships between human beings. To find
justification in the Law of History for the regime's organized injustice
is a crucial issue for Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, where he goes
through a serious soul-searching while waiting for his trial and execu-
tion. A prominent member of the Party, he was willing to denounce

and sacrifice others in the interest of the Party; now it is his turn to be
sacrificed. Where did he go wrong? By following what he believed to
be the Law of History, did he offend against a concept of justice that
is at once universal and deeply personal to all human beings? Krymon
in Grossman's Life and Fate and Zugyin in Rodionov's Chocolate are
faced with a similar dilemma, and we could find many more examples.

Characters in Zinoviev's The Radiant Future argue endlessly whether

the deliberate miscarriage of Soviet justice over long decades can be
explained mainly by the harshness or vagaries of historical circum-

stances or as an essential, organic feature of the Soviet regime from
the beginning. Central to all these discussions, all this soul-searching,
is a passionate commitment to the Utopian ideal of justice, as if the
chances of socialism in the sweep of historical forces were a matter of
humanity's salvation or damnation.

To shed more light on what is at stake in contemplating these secular

concepts with that quasi-religious intensity that is so typical of the
dystopian fiction of the twentieth century, let us go back to some of
the nineteenth-century precursors of utopian-dystopian thought.

CHAPTER TWO

Nineteenth-Century Precursors

of the Dystopian Vision

We have suggested that in the secular modern age beginning with the

Enlightenment, the Christian drama of salvation and damnation by
deity was transposed to the conflict between a Utopian "salvation" and
a dystopian "damnation" by means of history. This transposition was
already visible in the intensity of Utopian hopes awakened by the
French Revolution and the 1848 democratic revolutions, and in the
reversal of these hopes into disillusionment and cosmic despair upon

the revolutions' failure or defeat. This reversal formed the psycho-
historical background to Romanticism in England and on the Conti-
nent. (The twentieth-century parallel to this process is manifest in the
intensity of a world-wide hope in socialism inspired by the Russian
Revolution, and in the reversal of this hope into disillusionment and
despair following the failure - noticed by many only step by step - of
that Utopian experiment). Ironically, it is precisely the Enlightenment's
transposition of the originally cosmic, spiritual drama of salvation to
the secular, historical arena that now lends a quasi-religious intensity
to the contemporary contemplation of history. It is this push and pull
between secular and religious notions when contemplating history that
marks the nineteeth-century precursors of twentieth-century dystopian
nction. Imre Madach's The Tragedy of Man is a case in point.

ADAM AND E V E ' S J O U R N E Y T H R O U G H H I S T O R Y :

THE TRAGEDY OF MAN

Written in i860 in Hungary, The Tragedy of Man is one of those
curious late Romantic verse dramas where theology, biblical studies,

na the scientific, and consequently secular, philosophy of the modern

^ are almost seamlessly intertwined. The play commences with a

m Heaven, where the Creator debates the fate of Man with the

44

Dystopia West

great naysayer, Lucifer. In the next scene Lucifer appears to Adam and
Eve and causes their expulsion from Eden. As if to display to fallen
man the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, in the next twelve scenes
Lucifer takes Adam on a dream-journey through history. At the end,
to complete the biblical framework, Adam awakes from the nightmare

of history and returns to Eve outside the gates of Paradise.

Although often staged (according to prominent director Sandor

Hevesi's suggestion)

1

as a medieval mystery play, I suggest that The

Tragedy of Man is essentially a Romantic precursor of the dystopian

fiction of the twentieth century: it is speculative fiction, including a
trip into the future (it even includes space travel); it demonstrates the
continuous interaction between Utopian and dystopian perspectives in
the numerous political dreams of Messianism that inevitably turn into
the nightmares of dictatorship; and it introduces a consistently com-
pelling parallel between the eschatology of salvation and damnation

and the secular, political images of Utopia and dystopia.

The play reflects political disillusionment during a period of conser-

vative oppression that followed the defeat of the 1848 Hungarian War
of Independence, one of the many defeated or betrayed democratic
revolutions of the period. Just as significantly, it reflects the wider
philosophical-theological issues of the Romantic cosmic revolution.
Whether Blake was right in assuming that, in writing Paradise Lost,
Milton subconsciously must have been "of the devil's party," what
Milton most explicitly had set out to do was "to justify the ways of

God to Man." By contrast, Goethe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred and
Cain refuse to justify God's authority to forbid Man the Tree of
Knowledge; in the company of these romantic rebels, Adam, the hero
of The Tragedy of Man, expresses no sense of guilt for having suc-
cumbed to naysayer Lucifer's temptation and partaken of the forbidden
fruit. Going even further, by making Lucifer accompany Adam on his
trip through history, Madach embraces Lucifer's very "spirit of nega-
tion," appointing him an essential player not in the struggle between
good and evil but in the dialectic between affirmation and negation in
the enfolding process of history. In fact, when Madach's Lord announces
that Lucifer's "cold knowledge and negation will / Become the yeast
to make man's spirit still / Ferment and deviate," Adam absorbs the
energies of the naysayer with impunity.

Although Madach struggles valiantly to reconcile Man's historical

destiny with the biblical framework, I would suggest that the Scriptures
are used here in an essentially figurative way, as if to justify, or even
raise to the power of mythology, the relatively new "religion of human-
ity" as formulated by the Enlightenment and carried on by the Romantic

Nineteenth-Century Precursors

45

movement. From the beginning of the play we see the Lord as a distant,
Newtonian creator, who, once he produced the clocklike machine of
the world, is ready to withdraw: the first lines of The Tragedy of Man
announce this distance emphatically: "The giant structure is completed,
yes! / The engine turns, while the Creator rests." Also, Adam is unlike

Goethe's Faust or Byron's Manfred in being engaged neither in personal
battle with, nor in passionate search of, God. He is engaged exclusively
in exploring the dilemma of human nature in the arena of history.

The questions Madach raises about the goal of existence in the inter-

action among the Lord, Adam, Eve, and Lucifer clearly create a reli-
gious framework. But does this framework alone guarantee a religious
solution to a religious dilemma?

Both Northrop Frye and George Steiner have observed that in an

age of faith there is no room for tragedy: Creation, Original Sin,
Redemption, and Paradise Regained form a compelling proof that
what God has planned for humanity is ultimately a Divine Comedy,
with an assuredly happy ending. By contrast, Adam's journey in The

Tragedy of Man is genuinely tragic. Adam feels no sense of sin and
no fear of hell. Most significantly, except for one fleeting remark made
by Eve, the play does not hold out faith in a Messiah or Redeemer, or

in an afterlife, for that matter. (It is a serious misconception when in
certain performances of the play some directors have felt it necessary
to introduce the Virgin Mary

z

into the last scene.) Adam does battle

without the reassurance of eschatology. His ambition to go through
the historical struggle and advance the cause of humanity is juxtaposed
to the possibility that the sun might be cooling off and humanity might
regress to a primitive, bestial state, engaged in a ruthless battle for

survival (a notion anticipating Darwin's concept of the survival of the
fittest as the most ruthless members of the species). It is in its juxta-
position of the individual's high aspirations and overwhelming, inevi-
table disaster that The Tragedy of Man anticipates the catastrophism
of Capek, Kafka, and Witkiewicz, the dark historical diagnosticians of
Eastern Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike
these, however, Madach's vision is not absurd; it is genuinely tragic in
asserting the value and nobility of Adam's striving, even in the midst
of his suffering and frustration.

The staging of such a complex play as effective theatre has posed

several obvious dilemmas. Mystery play or tragedy? Religious drama
or a secular contemplation of history? What should be the interaction

between the biblical framework (in scenes 1, 2, and 15) and the more

concrete historical texture of the scenes between? These questions find
their answer if we follow the consistent dialectical pattern of high

46 Dystopia West

aspirations alternating with disillusionment suggested by Madach in

the historical scenes.

In Egypt, Adam is Pharaoh, who makes millions of slaves toil and

die building the pyramid for his eternal glory. Eve appears as the
beautiful wife of a slave tormented to death; it is she who draws
Pharaoh's attention to the injustice of millions dying for one. By

contrast, in the next scene in Athens, Adam appears as Miltiades, the

heroic general ready to sacrifice his life for the multitudes. But the
multitudes are fickle: they denounce him as a traitor and take his life.

The next scene takes us to Rome during its decline: the disillusioned

Adam is Sergiolus, a Roman playboy, and Eve is his companion in

pleasure, a prostitute. But hedonism is not a satisfactory answer to the
questions of existence; faced with the plague and the appearance of

St Peter as a Christian preacher, the hero expresses his desire to pursue
higher spiritual aspirations by becoming a Christian.

According to the consistent dialectic between aspirations and disil-

lusionment, the next scene takes us to Constantinople, where Adam
appears as Tancred, the triumphant Christian hero returning from the

Crusades. But now the character of the Apostle Peter, representative
of the spirit of Christ in the previous scene, appears as a fanatical
preacher expressive of the cruelty and pettiness of the Church as an

institution; he is ready to burn those whose form of belief the Church
declares a heresy.

Disillusioned by the abuses of the religious ideal, Adam now appears

in Renaissance Prague as Kepler, the scientist. But in the corrupt and
callous court of the Habsburgs, the great scientist is an object of ridicule.
In his despair he wishes himself into an epoch with higher aspirations;

consequently, in the next scene of Kepler's dream, Adam appears in Paris

as Danton, inspired leader of the French Revolution. He is idolized by
the crowd as long as they know him as an orator urging them to the

execution of more and more traitors. But when he reveals sympathy for
Eve, now one of his aristocratic victims, the angry mob turns against

him. Danton himself is led to the guillotine as a traitor.

Undoubtedly, the scene of the French Revolution is a precursor of

the dystopian impulse. When Danton announces "Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity!" the crowd echoes: "And death on those who fail to
recognize them" (Scene 9.1-2.). Here, and not in original sin, is the
crux of the dilemma of human nature: high ideals are diametrically

reversed by the mob's willingness to bring hatred, injustice, and cruelty
into the methods of fulfilling these ideals.

3

Still, Adam draws a conclusion from this episode that is unique

among his commentaries on each stage of his journey through history.
In spite of the bloodshed and mass hysteria of the Reign of Terror,

Nineteenth-Century Precursors

47

Adam upholds the ideals of the French Revolution: "What mighty
visions were before my eyes, / All but the blind could see and realize /
The godly spark, covered by blood and mire: / How great they were
in virtue, sin and ire!"

It is this nostalgia for the ideals of a democratic Utopia, and not the

religious hope for Paradise Regained, that forms the emotional centre
of the play. It is probably by emphasizing the emotional intensity of

this scene, which so well supports its philosophical content, that the
play has been staged most effectively: in fact, in a Prague production
in I892,, this was the scene that sparked a revolutionary demonstration
that ended in the authorities' banning of the play.

Still searching for the ideals of Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty, in

the next scene Adam appears in the London of the Industrial Revolu-
tion, the Vanity Fair of capitalism, where the owners of the factory
exploit the worker, the worker turns to drink and crime, and where
everything, even love, is for sale. Madach here foreshadows Marx's

metaphor of the self-destructiveness of capitalism: at the frenzied
ending of the scene, the entire crazed Vanity Fair jump into a huge
grave, dug by themselves.

To find a society that assures not only scientific progress but also

the just distribution of the goods produced, Madach now takes a look
at socialism - a version of Charles Fourier's Utopian socialism, centred
on the phalanstery. In this scene Madach also takes Plato to task for
suggesting in The Republic that the young guardian should be sepa-
rated from his mother, or that the child of guardians should be
demoted to the "iron" of the lower classes if his mental powers are

not sufficiently promising for the "silver" upper class. In its parody of
the cruelty of "pure reason," this scene is a direct precursor of that
classic of the dystopian genre, Huxley's Brave New World. What
promises to be the fulfilment of man's Utopian hopes and expectations
turns out to be the dictatorship of the mass mind: Michelangelo is

forced to spend his talent carving chair legs, and Plato himself is
punished when caught thinking or daydreaming. Madach's phalanstery
scene emphasizes the indignities implied by the rule of pure reason,
the scientist engaged in measuring the child's brain capacity to deter-
mine his caste, a nightmarish society very much like those in Huxley's
or Zamiatin's dystopian fiction.

In the next scene, set in the frozen Arctic, Madach takes us even

further along the road of disillusionment: Adam finds that even science
nas proved impotent in saving humanity from the cosmic disaster, the

cooling off of the sun. Food is scarce, and only the ruthless have a

, chance of surviving. (The scene foreshadows the bleak vision of the
^distant future in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine.) Seeing that Adam

4

8

Dystopia West

despairs of the inevitable pattern of high Utopian aspirations followed
by dark valleys of dystopian despair throughout history, Lucifer takes
him on a journey in space, to tempt him to leave the Earth's orbit: at
the last minute Adam resists this temptation. Still, he contemplates

suicide. But when he returns to Eve at the gates of Paradise, he learns
that she is expecting a child. For the sake of the unborn child Adam
is ready to enter that unending struggle for the future that is the stream
of history. However, he finally turns to the Lord for counsel. The words
he hears offer neither the historical hope of achieving Utopia nor the
theological promise of Heaven and Redemption. No wonder. The

words of the Lord are simply an echo of Adam's own words uttered
earlier in the depth of despair: Man must keep on striving; our destiny

is fulfilled in the endless process of striving, not in the reaching of any
particular goal.

An evocative commentary on the loss of Paradise, the play offers no

hope for regaining Paradise in any of its dimensions except, tempo-
rarily, through romantic love, through the cultivation of memory, and
through poetry. In her role as the Eternal Feminine, Eve is the guardian

of the memory of Paradise: "And I shall build a bower like the one /

We had before; and so I shall bring back / Our lost Garden of Eden"

(scene 3.5-6). To Adam, in her various incarnations throughout the
play Eve is not only the reminder of but also the personification of
Paradise, almost as if he has dreamed her - the personification of the

"lost Eden" as well. (Madach's own marriage collapsed, probably

under the tremendous weight of expectations the Romantic mythos
imposes upon woman.)

Even in this respect Madach is a precursor of twentieth-century

dystopian fiction: many readers of Nineteen Eighty-four have felt that

Julia is primarily a phenomenon of Winston's mind; only after he

dreams about meeting her in the Golden Country do they actually meet
and visit the Golden Country. The same could be said about Lenina's
portrayal in Huxley's Brave New World; she is as much a beautiful

object of the Savage's Romantic dream of love as a full-fledged char-
acter. Does Madach anticipate the twentieth-century world of dystopia,
or do, for some reason, Huxley and Orwell return to the Eternal
Feminine of the Romantic cosmos as a counterpoint to the protagonist's
dehumanized world of dystopia?

Be that as it may, Adam's feelings for Eve contribute to the contin-

uous interaction between religious and secular motives in The Tragedy
of Man, which turns this late Romantic throwback to the medieval
mystery play into the precursor of twentieth-century dystopian fiction.
In spite of the biblical framework, the aspirations of the work are

Nineteenth-Century Precursors

4 9

secular and historical. Both the voices of the Lord and of Lucifer are
voices within Adam: advocating man's task as the process of endless
striving, the play focuses on the moral and psychological aspects of
the religious question about the purpose of existence. It offers a
primarily secular answer to the religious dilemma.

4

The play remains a powerful reminder of the surprisingly close

relationship between the heaven and hell of the religious biblical
framework and its secularized version, the messianic political aspira-
tions of Utopia, and the infernal nightmare of the dystopic societies of
our times. It is also a reminder that it was the Romantic movement
that registered this transition most vividly, and hence created precursors
to dystopian fiction.

T H E G R A N D I N Q U I S I T O R

In his exploration of utopian-dystopian discourse in the historical
process, Madach creates a dialectical relationship between the Roman
scene, where the Apostle Peter appears to introduce the new faith, and
the following scene in Constantinople, in which Peter reappears as a
fanatical preacher. He no longer represents the live spirit but the dead
letter of Christianity; the Church becomes a tyrannical institution that
burns the heretic at the stake. In this reversal Madach foreshadows
another, far better-known nineteenth-century precursor of twentieth-
century dystopian fiction, and the most memorable metamorphosis of
the Messiah into the Dictator, in Dostoevski's "Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov, written in 1880.

Memorably, Dostoevski's tale is built on a shocking reversal: if Christ

returned to Earth, he would be killed or turned away again, and this
time by the very Church that was founded to preserve his spirit on
Earth. The tale is set in sixteenth-century Seville. When Christ appears,
he is thrown into the dungeon of the Inquisition, and the Grand Inquis-
itor passes judgment on Christ's teachings, although it is allegedly in
the name of these teachings that the Church rules over the multitudes.

The horrible secret Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor reveals here is that

it is Satan and not Christ who is embraced by the Church. Christ failed
to obtain power over the world because he rejected all three of Satan's
temptations: "You would have accomplished all that man seeks on
earth, that is to say, whom to worship, to whom to entrust his
conscience and how at last to unite them all in a common, harmonious
and incontestable ant-hill, for the need of universal unity is the third
and last torment of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to
organize itself into a world state." As an institution in the world, the

5°

Dystopia West

Church had to choose the emblems of worldly power, "And so we
have taken the sword of Caesar and, having taken it, we of course
rejected you and followed him."

5

The Grand Inquisitor argues that he is ruling over men in their own

interest, because "men do not really want to be free; they want to be
happy. They can only be happy by giving up their freedom." According
to Krishna Kumar, "what made the 'legend' so seductive was its
capacity for general deployment against a much wider range of modern
thought and practice ... modern hedonism, utilitarianism, liberalism,
positivism, socialism and practically any other social philosophy which

drew on Enlightenment rationalism and modern science."

6

Although

Kumar is fully justified in drawing such a wide circumference of
targets, on the whole I tend to agree with E.H. Carr that, more

specifically, "the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor enables Dostoevski
to air his hatred, the time-honoured Russian hatred, of the Roman
Catholic Church by putting the condemnation of Christ into the mouth
of one of its principal agents. In more than one passage of his earlier
works he had compared Catholicism with Socialism: both strive to
make a man happy by relieving him of his personal responsibility ...
The degradation of mankind to the level of 'cattle,' the defence of free

will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, is one of the
cornerstones of Dostoevski's thought."

7

But no matter how wide or narrow we set the political resonance of

the parable and its target, it must be obvious that its vast influence on
literature is due to its illumination of the inevitable contrast between

spirit and institution; the contrast between the Messiah and the Church
forces the institution to corrupt the spirit if it wants to survive in the
world. This paradigm would later express the same kind of contrast
between the spirit of the socialist revolution and the Party or the state,
turning this spirit inside out and twisting its concept of universal justice

into the terror of dictatorship. As a result, Dostoevski's parable served
as an "encouragement and ammunition to all those who sought to resist
the encroachment of the modern totalitarian state - the central concern
of the anti-utopians."

8

Hannah Arendt draws attention to Christ's silence throughout the

scene and to the fact that the confrontation ends "by a gesture, the
gesture of a kiss, not by words." In exploring the inevitable defeat of
the spirit in the hands of the institution, Arendt suggests that "the
tragedy is that the law is made for men, and neither for angels or for

devils," or, to put it another way, "that absolute goodness is hardly
less dangerous than absolute evil" when it comes to the political realm
where people should be able to use "the language of persuasion,
negotiation and compromise." The defeat of Christ in this scene, then,

Nineteenth-Century Precursors 51

is not due to the weakness of the good in the world, since "goodness
is strong, stronger perhaps even than wickedness, but that it shares
with 'elemental evil' the elementary violence inherent in all strength
and detrimental to all forms of political organization."

9

Picking up on this same detail, George Steiner also feels that "the

Dostoyevskijan position is gathered into the silence of Christ; it is
realized not in language, but in a single gesture." Steiner considers this
gesture a tragic admission of powerlessness in the world: "the kiss
which Christ bestows on the inquisitor [is] something of an evasion."

10

Three of our dystopian satires, We, Brave New World, and Nineteen

Eighty-four, allude to this tragic confrontation in the climactic scene

of the protagonist's trial, where he confronts the "Grand Inquisitor"
of the state religion.

It is probably typical of Huxley, as a practitioner of Menippean sat-

ire, primarily a satire of ideas, that in his rendering of the scene in the
confrontation between the Controller and the Savage, the Savage hap-
pens to be brilliantly eloquent, and at least as verbal as his opponent.

Zamiatin, by contrast, renders Dostoevski's scene in its original

cast: D-503, the protagonist, is almost entirely silent at his trial, while
his Grand Inquisitor, the Benefactor, explains the mystery of his
worldly power in short, staccato phrases in an impressionistically
rendered sketch of the Crucifixion. The Benefactor here admits he
acted in this scene as an executioner, and offers a twofold justification
for the role he assumed then and has been practising ever since. He
is convinced of the necessity of fulfilling the executioner's role to allow
the majestic tragedy designed by God to reach its fulfilment. He also
argues that God himself is at least as cruel as the executioner of

Christ, in making men suffer in hell for eternity. Here Zamiatin

touches upon another Romantic precursor of the dystopian vision,
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Articulating the essential "sympathy with the
devil" of the Satanic school of English Romanticism, Shelley argues:

"If the devil takes but half the pleasure in tormenting a sinner which

God does, who took the trouble to create him, and then to invent a
system of casuistry by which he might excuse himself for devoting
him to eternal torment, this reward must be considerable." Shelley
concludes by declaring that it is "God's government" that is respon-
sible for "the exertion of the Devil, to tempt, betray, and accuse
unfortunate man,"

11

and in the hero of his Prometheus Unbound he

creates a complex image of the Romantic poet, who acts both as the

satanic rebel against the sky god as well as the "gentle youth upon
the cross" who will redeem humanity without violence.

Interestingly, Zamiatin reveals here the same Shelleyan contrast

between the tragic goodness of Christ and the tyrannical authority of

52-

Dystopia West

God the Father, as if carrying on the notions of the Romantic cosmic
revolution, reinforced further by the imagery of Bakunin's anarchism
(based on the condemnation of any form of political authority.) In
Zamiatin's interpretation, the Christ archetype in the heretic, the poet,
the tragic hero, the protagonist-narrator becomes the counter-image not
of Satan but of God the Father: D-503 forms an alliance with the "Mefi"
rebels who proudly assume a Satanic stance in the Mephistophelian
rebellion against God the tyrant. Undoubtedly, the archetype of Christ
as the heretic, the revolutionary, the Promethean rebel against the sky
god is also alluded to in several images related to the protagonist's lover,
I-330, whose face "is marked with a cross"(53) and who becomes
the martyr of the Mefi revolution against the Benefactor, "crucified" for
her faith in freedom, poetry, music, individualism, and for her attack
on the entropy inherent in any kind of dogmatism that stands in the
way of the energies of change. This archetype also comes to the surface

in the protagonist's own persona. When, after the defeat of the revolution,
he is awaiting his trial, he envisages the scene of the Pieta, with the old
woman with the wrinkled mouth he had met at the Ancient House in
the role of his grieving mother: "And let me nail, or let me be nailed -
perhaps it is all the same - but so that she would hear what no one else
heard, so that her old woman's mouth, drawn together, wrinkled." (216).

As for Orwell's interpretation of The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,

Winston's trial takes place in the Ministry of Love, in the torture
chamber. Winston argues for the power of the "Spirit of Man" that
will break the eternal rule of the Party's tyranny; O'Brien reveals the

mystery behind the Party's infinite strength as a self-renewing spiral;
it is precisely the inevitable and incessant interaction between tyrant
and heretic that is the principle of total domination. O'Brien's Grand
Inquisitor no longer justifies himself, as the Controller or the Benefac-
tor does: he is not saying that he also offers a self-sacrifice when he
makes a sacrifice of the heretic; he no longer claims that he wants to
make the multitude happy (albeit at the price of depriving them of
consciousness, individuality, and the chance of exercising free will).

O'Brien reveals to Winston that the naked truth is that "the object of
persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object
of power is power" (227). In other words, he is entirely without shame
or pretensions, having no sense of morality any more. What Orwell
suggests here is that modern totalitarian rule, in this instance Stalinism,
no longer even pretends, even to itself, to maintain any ties with the
original spirit of the Messiah in whose name it came to power.

It is interesting that all three of these classics of dystopian fiction

reflect upon Dostoevski's parable by concentrating on the impasse
between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor at Christ's second trial.
Allusions to this parable are still present in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451,

Nineteenth-Century Precursors 53

when Fire Chief Beatty renders a cynical self-justification of his role
as the burner of books, houses, and subversives, by presenting himself
as the upholder of the people's peace and happiness; in the same speech

he warns Guy Montag, the protagonist, about the price the subversive
must pay for non-conformity. In a more skeletal form the confrontation
is also acted out in Player Piano, in the scene of Paul Proteus's

confrontation with Kroner, when the latter justifies the role of the
managers and technocrats who deprive the population of their right
to work, their right to human dignity. Occasional hints at the scene
are also traceable in The Handmaid's Tale, in Offred's conversation

with the Commander, who considers his own role justifiable.

Yet there is also another angle worth exploring in Dostoevski's

influential parable: the responsibility of the masses who not only
tolerate the dictator without resistance but also celebrate and deify
him. The passage George Steiner singles out from Dostoevski's "Leg-

end" is the Grand Inquisitor's description of the masses, their childlike
need for belonging and their deep-seated fear of freedom:

Then we shall give them the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such
as they are by nature ... We shall show them that they are weak, that they
are only pitiful children ... They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken
before us, and will be proud of our being so powerful and clever, that we have
been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions ... And

they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow them or forbid them to live
with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children - according
to whether they have been obedient or disobedient - and they will submit to

us gladly and cheerfully ... And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it
will save them from the great anxiety and the terrible agony they endure at
present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the

millions of creatures except the hundred thousands who rule over them."

12

According to Steiner, here Dostoevski foresees the irrational frenzy of
the millions who deified Hitler and Stalin: "recent history has made it
difficult to read this passage ... with detachment. It testifies to a gift
of foresight bordering on the daemonic ... It does foreshadow, with
uncanny prescience, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century

- thought control, the annihilating and redemptive powers of the elite,
the brutish delight of the masses in the ... rituals of Nuremberg and
the Moscow Sports Palace, the instinct of confession, and the total
subordination of private to public life."

13

Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy's short dystopian parable of 1935,

"Barabbas," examines the same dilemma, the irrational bond between

the dictator and the masses. For three days after the Crucifixion, the
parable tells us, the people of Jerusalem had to suffer the consequences

54

Dystopia West

Nineteenth-Century Precursors

55

of having asked Pilate to spare the life of Barabbas and not that of
the Nazarene. Barabbas is a robber and a murderer, and once set free,
creates a reign of terror among the people of Jerusalem. When "at
sunset on the third day" the Nazarene returns and the same people
complain to him about Barabbas, they bitterly regret their mistake.
When they are led back to the house of Pilate, Pilate asks once again:

"Whom, then, will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas or the Nazarene? And now

he made a sign.
And then there arose an uproar, and the cry went forth from the multitude
like thunder.
And the multitude shouted, "Barabbas!"
And they looked upon each other in great fear because each of them, separately had

shouted "The Nazarene!"

14

Karinthy returns here to Dostoevski's "Legend" with a significant
variation, to point out the responsibility of the masses in allowing the
fascist dictator to come to power in Italy and Germany; he also
suggests that mysterious difference between the political attitudes of
human beings as individuals and the political attitudes of mass man
in the crowd. "And the Master became pale, and turning, looked upon
the multitude. And he did recognize of each and everyone his counte-

nance; but in the twilight of the eve, these many faces became a single
one, an enormous head, which was grinning stupidly and malignantly
and with impudence at his face."

15

Here is the Savage's nightmare, in Brave New World, of the "inter-

minable stream" of people with one face, as the crowd of Deltas turn
against him when he attempts to liberate them. It is the same enormous
head, the same stupid grin, the same impudence and malignance. It

appears again in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, where Rubashov looks
at the gloating, malignant crowd at his trial.

It is significant how often allusions to Dostoevski's parable exploring

the responsibility of the masses appear in the dystopian fiction written
in Eastern and Central Europe in our period. In Abram Tertz's The

Trial Begins, at the dictator's funeral a young girl is crushed to death,

together with hundreds of others, in the mad rush of the vast crowd
eager to have a last glimpse of their idol. In the midst of this turmoil,
hysterical voices start screaming that they should "unmask" the enemy

agents hiding among them and responsible for these accidents.

In his Makepeace Experiment (also translated as Lyubimov) Tertz

gives many more palpable illustrations of how easily the masses suc-
cumb to the deceptions of dictatorship. As usual on the Day of
Solidarity, the population of Lyubimov waits patiently at the town
square for the leader's address, because "after Comrade Tishchenko's

speech, there was nothing to stop us from drinking for the rest of the
day." Tertz introduces the conceit that Leonard Makepeace has hyp-

notic powers and can make Tishchenko ask the crowd "unanimously
to elect" Leonard as their new leader. Used to this method of "elec-
tion," the people immediately comply. The satirist's point is that,
forced into the anonymity of the crowd, the people are so used to

expressing enthusiasm by decree that they don't know or care which
leader they are cheering: "Within half a minute ... isolated voices rang
out in the crowd and very soon the whole multitude was stirring,
rumbling and shouting its approval of the proposed resolution: 'Long

live Makepeace! Long live our glorious Leonard!' - Only one villager
asked who Leonard Makepeace was and how he deserved the highest
of honours, but he was immediately shouted down."

16

At this point, to dramatize the childishness of the people's traditional

worship of any authority, the satirist interjects a grotesque image of
the crowd as a two-month-old infant who now "bared its toothless
gums from ear to ear and squealed: 'I want Lenny to be our Tsar! I
want Lenny Makepeace to be our Tsar!'"

17

In Voinovich's Moscow 2042 - another eccentric but powerful ren-

dering of the triangle of protagonist, Grand Inquisitor, and thought-
lessly cheering masses - the dying Genialissimo explains to Vitalij, the
narrator-protagonist in the novel, why a one-man rule is still preferable

to the rule of the people: '"My friend,' said the former Genialissimo
sadly, 'what people are you talking about? And who are the people
anyway? Is there any difference between the people, the populace,
society, the mob, the nation, the masses? What do you call those

millions of people who run enthusiastically after their leaders, carrying
their portraits and chanting their senseless slogans?""

8

Genialissimo

concludes, just as sadly, that "it's much more difficult to convince an
individual of an idiotic idea than an entire people," and thereby he

justifies his own role as dictator.

What becomes apparent from most of the works of dystopian fiction

examined in this study is the extraordinary resonance of Dostoevski's
parable. A dramatization of a religious mystery, the parable has nev-

ertheless inspired an essentially secular political-philosophical dis-
course that debates the form of government and the dilemma of social
justice in the course of history.

If it is true that "the Russian novel did come out of [Gogol's]

Cloak,"

19

it could be said with equal justice that the central dramatic

situation for twentieth-century dystopian fiction in both East and West

came out of Dostoevski's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor": it is the
dramatic emblem of the protagonist's trial, followed by inevitably harsh
retribution, presided over by the Grand Inquisitor of the state religion,

with a crowd of faceless, cheering mass men in the background.

CHAPTER THREE

The Dictator behind the Mask:

Zamiatin's We,

Huxley's Brave New World, and

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four

YEVGENY ZAMIATIN: WE

At first glance Zamiatin's We (1920) seems to be a direct continuation
of the phalanstery scene in Madach's The Tragedy of Man, parodying
the stifling of creativity in Fourier's phalanstery and pointing at the
ultimate cruelty of pure reason in Plato's Republic. Zamiatin refers to
the Dictator as a "bald, Socratically bald, man" (215), a double-edged
thrust at Lenin and at the central voice in The Republic. The novel also
continues the nineteenth century's secularized meditation about the fate

of Adam and Eve in "that ancient legend of Paradise," and acts out
once more that central debate between freedom and happiness intro-
duced in Dostoevski's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor": "Those two
in paradise," explains the protagonist's friend R-13, "were given a
choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness.
There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom [... and]
for ages afterward they longed for the chains" (61). The One State,
one thousand years after "our time" in 1920, is run on the conviction
that the leader, "the Benefactor ... protects our unfreedom - that is our
happiness" (62). But the glittering city under a glass dome, a structure
reminiscent of Chernishevki's Utopia with its allusions to the Crystal
Palace, and even further back, of the New Jerusalem as "the city [of]
pure gold, as it were transparent glass,"

1

gradually reveals that what

was to shelter and protect this glittering paradise also happens to choke
its vitality. By cutting off the city from the green wilderness that accom-
modates the world of instinct, the glass dome also stands for the air-
lessness of pure reason; its stifling effect is repeated in its most lethal
version in the Gas Bell that happens to be the miniature replica of the
glass dome both in its shape and substance, combining a "glass jar

[and] the air pump" (80), a contraption deliberately designed to

asphyxiate the subversive.

The Dictator behind the Mask 57

While the novel continues the nineteenth-century theme of the reversal

between Utopia and dystopia, it is also an exceptionally "timely" repre-

sentation of the 1920s. In this decade the fear of the machine that turns
human beings into machines is demonstrated in many dystopian works

in the West - for example, in the films of Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and
Charlie Chaplin (Modern Times). Zamiatin wrote We in 1920, the same

year in which Capek wrote RUR: The idea of robots as "human beings
who worked without thinking"

2

was very much present in the public

mind, and was also connected with the atavistic fear of the eventual anni-
hilation of the humanity of our species, the collective loss of our individ-
ual soul, of being reduced to mere cyphers. The people of Zamiatin's One

State have no names, only numbers. The protagonist, D-503, is a math-

ematician and the designer of a spaceship, a true disciple of pure reason.

When he is told that ten of his men died while working on the spaceship,
he reacts by congratulating himself on not being "prone to arithmetically
illiterate pity." He regards their loss as negligible, "less than a hundred

millionth part of the population" (108). Reduced to numbers, people lose
their identity and are no longer unique or irreplacable: in the world cre-

ated by and for the machine, human beings become redundant. (Henry
Foster, in Huxley's World State, expresses the same attitude when he

casually announces that the number of people who died in a Japanese
earthquake will easily be replaced in the laboratory by the same number
of the same type and caste. In Orwell's rendering of a similar concept,

Winston Smith, a propaganda writer, creates the imaginary figure of a
hero he names Comrade Ogilvy, who from then on will assume the exist-
ence of a citizen of Oceania while at the same time thousands of victims

are daily vapourized by the state; they disappear in the memory hole

without a trace of having ever existed.)

At its widest Zamiatin's satirical target is universal; from a closer

range the satirist targets machine worship in Russia under Lenin, who
declared that the introduction of electricity would accomplish half of

the task of building Communism. However, Zamiatin's most immedi-
ate target among the machine worshippers is Alexei Gastev, a mechanic

and a "factory poet, who was given the task by Lenin to set up an
experimental laboratory of human robotry known as the Central

Institute of Labor," which functioned between 1920 and 1938. In his
factory poems Gastev's "wildest visions of 1918-19 are pre-visions of
Capek and Zamiatin and celebrations of a coming event often warned

about in science fiction: the takeover by machines." Horrified by this

takeover, Zamiatin satirizes Gastev, who "publicly praised Taylor and
Ford as his models, and apparently recognized the Ford plant ... as a

model for cultural transformation."

3

Machine worship and idolization of Ford and Taylor were also

expressive of the political climate. In effect, it could have been the

58 Dystopia West

Soviet Union as much as America that Huxley had in mind when he
made the World State in Brave New World substitute the name of OUR

F O R D

for

OUR L O R D :

"Lenin was explicit about the need to adopt

Taylor-like methods of labor organization, piecework, progressive

wages, scientific management and one-man control," while Stalin in
the first five-year plan struck "one of the largest technical import
deals" with Ford." With the parts, the tractors, and the engineers came

also the ideas and values that had made Ford the auto king and the
symbol of colossal productivity ... To some Ford's conveyor belt was
not only the model for the factory but for society as well."

4

Like a factory, the society of the One State runs according to Taylor's

Table of Hours, and it is the spirit of Taylor, that mania for mathe-
matical order and logic that insists on translating the immeasurable

into the measurable, that comes to control Eros (by dedicating exactly
one "Personal Hour" to sexual pleasure), as well as to rein in Pegasus

by declaring that poetry is to be "used" for propaganda tasks. In the
entire cultural heritage of mankind, the narrator finds the twentieth-
century Railway Guide "the greatest literary monument to have come
down to us from ancient days" because it anticipates the beauty of
Taylor's Table of Hours, and he compares R-13, the state poet, to

Columbus, for versifying the multiplication table.

Zamiatin's focus on the role of poetry is clearly meant as a satire of

Lenin's insistence that the energies of poetry and literature must be
harnessed into the service of the state, a narrow utilitarian approach
that is paralelled by Lenin's intolerance of any opposition. In the One

State the poet, the representative of the creative spontaneity of our
mind in society, always in search of new ways of thinking and seeing,
is reduced to a mindless civil servant, designated to sing the praises of
the dictator in "Daily Odes to the Benefactor," to legitimize the
execution of subversives, and to versify court sentences and such

mundane pieces of propaganda as "He Who Was Late to Work" or

"Stanzas of Sexual Hygiene."

Had Zamiatin intended to parody Lenin's "On The Function of

Art,"

5

he could not have come any closer. He also shows the symmetry

between the dictator's insistence on "extracting electricity from the
amorous whisper of the waves" and on subjecting the "once wild
energy of poetry" to the strictest state censorship. Of course, Zamiatin's
parody here is particularly powerful because he puts these words of

severe accusation into the mouth of the narrator, who at this stage of the
novel is still a "true believer" and lavishes praise on the dictator for
having organized the poets into the Institute of State Poets and Writers,
for turning poetry into "civic service," and for practising strict cen-
sorhip, whereas in the past "it's simply ridiculous - everyone wrote

anything he pleased."

The Dictator behind the Mask

59

In fact, throughout the novel the satirist keeps returning to the poet

as the incarnation of the spirit of our creative freedom, whose very
existence is regarded as a threat to dictatorship. As we can see from
the more and more metaphorically foregrounded language in the pro-
tagonist's diary, the narrative device of the story, gradually D-503
himself becomes a poet, under the influence of another powerful energy
the dictatorship would like to but cannot totally harness to its own
purposes: Eros.

Like many other dystopian works of fiction, Zamiatin's novel reveals

a process in which the protagonist, originally in a fairly prestigious
position and reasonably well adjusted to an oppressive society, expe-
riences a quasi-mystical awakening to his true self through a woman
who makes him challenge the dictatorship's strict rules about sexuality.
The protagonist's awakening to a new consciousness has sexual, spir-
itual, and political dimensions, resulting in a subversive act: in We he
participates in a revolution; in Brave New World he instigates a riot;
in Nineteen Eighty-four he joins the underground organization of the
Brotherhood to overthrow Big Brother; and in Fahrenheit 451 he starts
to read and get in touch with other readers, a most subversive act in
a society where books are to be burnt. As a result, each protagonist
is put on trial and punished severely until he no longer poses a threat
to the system.

In We D-503's awakening is a complex process, since the person by

whom he is awakened to unprecedented sexual passion is I-330, not
only the prototype of the sexually liberated femme fatale of the begin-
ning of the twentieth century but also a gifted concert pianist, the
centre of a circle of friends and former lovers consisting of a poet, a

doctor, and a highly placed member of the secret police - all this, and
she also happens to be the mastermind, the leader, and finally the

martyr of a revolution against the dictator. Inevitably, falling in love
with her activates all the repressed or dormant powers of the mathe-
matician's psyche, and he undergoes a transformation instigated by the
liberating power of true music, true poetry, true sexual passion for her,
and political passion for the revolution against tyranny.To him this
transformation feels many times like a sickness, and indeed he is told
by a doctor: "You are in a bad way! Apparently you have developed
a soul" (89). At the end his soul will be destroyed by the "Operation,"
a surgical removal of the imagination, the core of the subversive
instinct for freedom.

The narrative is framed by two trials, followed in both cases by

execution - a pattern I have suggested directly relevant to the dystopian
society's reversal of the Utopian pursuit of justice. The first trial, held
on the "Day of Justice," focuses on the plight of a heretic poet who

would not sing the praises of the dictator and who, it is whispered,

6o

Dystopia West

insisted that he was a genius and called the Benefactor an executioner.
A mathematician with no more than a perfunctory interest in poetry,
the narrator at this point finds it perfectly natural that the subversive
will be put on trial, which means first the denunciation of his crime,

then his torture and "liquidation" by the Benefactor's Machine, which

becomes emblematic of the murderous consequences of combining the

worship of machinery with the worship of the dictator.

Of course, at a satirical level the "Day of Justice" is shown to be

the celebration of Injustice, the Benefactor's tyranny. The poet, in
Zamiatin's eyes, represents the natural freedom of the imagination that
simply cannot function unless it breaks the "iron chains of the law"
forbidding freedom. Zamiatin also condemns poets who yield up their

creativity to tyranny - for example, the state poet whose function it
is to denounce the subversive and praise the tyrant's Machine, and at
whose voice "the fresh, green trees withered, shriveled ... sap dripping
out - nothing remaining but the black crosses of their skeletons," until
every living thing "was new, everything was steel - a steel sun, steel

trees, steel men "(47). The character of the state poet is an allusion to
Gastev, who in fact praised the "New Messiah" of the machine as "the
iron demon of the age with the soul of man, nerves of steel and rails
for muscles."

6

That these images relating to the new Communist Man

must have appealed to Bolsheviks even before the revolution seems
quite probable; in 1913 one Joseph Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, for
example, decided to take the nom de guerre of Stalin, the man of steel.

It is in this scene of the first trial that the Benefactor makes his first

appearance, "a motionless figure, as if cast in metal," with "heavy
hands" and with a "slow cast-iron movement." Zamiatin is consistent
in relating political tyranny to the images of iron, steel, and machinery,
and relating poetry, passion, the subconscious, dreams, and revolution

to the free, indomitable green world of nature outside the glass dome.
The gigantic iron fist of the Benefactor, most readers would assume,
must be an allusion to Stalin; ironically, however, in 19Z0 Stalin had
not yet come to power. Rather, the image personifies dictatorship in

general, whose actions follow from the ruthless "iron logic" of an
ideology based on the "animation of machinery and the mechanization
of man."

7

Of course, Zamiatin was not the only one to recognize "the despotic

character of Taylorism" underlying its neurotic "frenzy for order," as
well as its anti intellectualism and hatred of any form of individualism.
The insurgent sailors and workers of the Kronstadt commune, observ-
ing that the Bolsheviks planned to introduce the sweated-labour system
of Taylor, included it in their bill of indictment of the Soviet regime in

1921.

8

To associate Taylorism and machine worship with one-man

The Dictator behind the Mask 6x

dictatorship was not that unusual at the time. What makes Zamiatin's

vision unique, however, is the revelation of a profound paradox: in the
guise of worshipping the enlightened and civilized world of science and

the powers of reason that had cast aside the "superstitions" of Chris-
tianity, the citizens of the One State actually regressed to the worship

of the Benefactor, a barbaric primitive deity whose power is based on
the ritual of human sacrifice. Thus the "guardians" who function as a

sophisticated secret police encourage people to denounce anyone sus-

pect - that is, "to surrender upon the altar of the One State their loved
ones, their friends, themselves" (40). But the ultimate moment of

human sacrifice takes place at the altar on Justice Day, when the Bene-
factor's Machine "liquidates" the subversive after he has been tortured

under the gas bell. Watching this ritual, the narrator feels nothing but
awe for the Benefactor-executioner and for the legalized injustice of the

monster state, where "I can have rights to the State; a gram to the ton."
He also approves of the purgative role of the state religion, which, he

admits, has retained certain beneficial elements of ancient religions.

"Yes, there was something of the old religions, something purifying like

a storm, in that solemnn ceremony" (49).

Of course, the politically naive narrator's approval reveals the sati-

rist's savage condemnation of the inversion of Christ's offering himself
as sacrifice into the sacrifice of human beings at the altar of "our God,

the One State" and the semi-divine Benefactor.

In the scene of the first trial Zamiatin exposes to us the recurring

conflict between the One State, which reduces human beings to num-
bers, and the individual, who cannot or will not accept this. By this

act he also establishes the framework for the second trial, which is a

repetition of the same scene at an emotionally more intense level.

The second trial is the climax of the novel. The narrator has under-

gone a transformation; he has admitted to himself his love for I-330. At
the revolutionary outburst on Election Day he carried her away in his

arms, and to aid the revolution he was preparing to pass over his space-
ship to her. After the revolution is overthrown and it is D-503's turn to

face his own trial, he comes to recognize the Benefactor as his own cruel
executioner. In this confrontation with the Benefactor the narrator is

asked to denounce his accomplices, first of all his lover, the revolutionary

I-330. Their dialogue is followed by his punishment: the "Operation"
of fantasectomy, the lobotomy of the imagination, the destruction of his
soul. Once he receives his punishment, he becomes once more a com-

pliant assistant to the Benefactor: he is ready to participate in the inter-
rogation, torture, and execution of I-330, not even remembering that
they had been lovers. Just like Winston Smith, who is forced to betray

Julia, D-503 is made to betray his lover. He also resists, but once he has

62 Dystopia West

his "Operation" it seems to him most natural to denounce her and take
his seat next to the Benefactor. This betrayal, in both cases, is equivalent
to the protagonist's losing his soul, as well as a complete loss of memory
of the old self.

In the course of their confrontation the Benefactor also reveals the

secret of the machinery of injustice and justifies his own role in this
machinery. Like the Grand Inquisitor, the Benefactor does not deny
that he has indeed taken on the role of the executioner, the one who
crucifies the best, the most honest, the most gifted in society. Nor does
he deny that, given the opportunity, he would assist at the Crucifixion
again and again. However, he explains that as an executioner he also

offers a self-sacrifice: "An executioner? ... a blue hill, a cross, a crowd.
Some - above, splashed with blood, are nailing a body to a cross;
others - below, splashed with tears, are lookng on ... Does it not seem
to you that the role of these above is the most difficult, the most
important? If not for them, would this entire majestic tragedy have
taken place?" (213).

The Benefactor's role is to execute the law of historical necessity, to

bring to its fulfilment the "majestic tragedy" God has designed for
humanity. And the Benefactor is willing to fulfil his role in this recur-
ring drama in the interest of the "happiness" of the multitude. Of
course, he admits that his role requires that he be cruel, but he justifies
himself by arguing that the God of Christianity is equally cruel: "And
what about the most merciful Christian God, slowly roasting in the
fires of hell all who would not submit. Was he not an executioner?
And was the number of those burned by the Christians on bonfires

less than the number of burned Christians?" (213).

In effect, the Benefactor simply performs an imitatio dei, or imitates

the role of God the Father. Moreover, he also believes that his own
love of humanity is actually more benevolent since he, a utilitarian
philosopher, is well versed in mathematics and aims for the greatest

happiness for the greatest number. It is in order to keep this majority

"happy" - that is, willing to accept their slavery uncritically - that he

must eliminate the poet, the subversive, the rebel - the representative
of the heretic spirit of the Messiah. He does this out of an "algebraic
love for humanity," and Zamiatin makes him admit that "algebraic
love of humanity is inevitably inhuman; and the inevitable mark of
truth is - its cruelty" (213).

According to Mirra Ginsburg, who translated the novel into English,

Zamiatin's We is one of the great tragic novels of our time.

9

At the

same time, I suggest, it is also a dystopian satire with a clear political
message based on the distinction between two time-planes: the One
State a thousand years after our time, and the extraterrestrial reader

The Dictator behind the Mask 63

whose intellectual level, the narrator assumes, must be at the stage of
the society that existed a thousand years before - that is, precisely at
the time the novel is written.

The narrative is presented in the form of entries in D-503's diary,

which originated as a piece of state propaganda: he was asked to gather
inspiring pamphlets about the One State for the benefit of the inhab-
itants on the various planets that his spaceship, the Integral, was
expected to contact and prepare for colonization by the Utopian One
State. Pointing at this satirical conceit, Zamiatin could ostensibly
suggest to the censor that the narrative is sheer fantasy, where D-503
addresses his words to the inhabitants on "the moon, on Venus, Mars,

Mercury" (20) one thousand years into our future. Of course, when
D-503 speculates that the inhabitants of these planets must be func-
tioning at the intellectual level of the narrator's ancestors a thousand
years before, the reader cannot fail to realize that D-503 is speaking
to "us," Zamiatin's contemporaries and Ideal Readers, in 1920.

At one point Zamiatin has D-503, ostensibly writing about his own

life experience in his diary, slip into the role of the satirist, when D-503
admits that he uses the camouflage of the suspenseful dramatic adven-
ture only to capture his contemporaries' attention and thereby commu-

nicate his bitter message safely: "like children you will swallow ...
everything bitter I shall give you only when it is coated with the thick
syrup of adventure" (103). This admission leads us to Zamiatin's core
concept of the cure for the deadly "dogmatization in Science, religion,
social life or art [that] is the entropy of thought." Poets, free thinkers,

the heretics of any orthodox dogma "are the only (bitter) remedy to
the entropy of human thought."

10

In We this "bitter remedy" undoubtedly implies a warning: the

worship of the machine, Taylorism, utilitarianism, the cold, emotion-
less worship of reason in the 1920s could easily lead to a totalitarian
One State where the original promise of the Messiah of science and
socialism would be subverted by the Deceiver, the totalitarian dictator

posing as the Benefactor of his people.

Gorman Beauchamp is right in reminding us that "the satire in We

is inclusive of much more than a specific regime or a particular
revolution; it comprehends modes of thought, millennial expectations,

chiliastic dogma, a mechanistic Weltanschauung that have come
increasingly to characterize Western culture and of which Soviet Marx-
ism is only one manifestation."

11

Nevertheless, the "red, fiery, deadly"

centre of Zamiatin's satirical passion is undeniably in the lived histor-
ical experience, in the fear of seeing the live spirit of the revolution

turn into the dead dogma of dictatorship, an anticipation born from
the historical moment at the time of writing in 1920.

6

4

Dystopia West

Here, in spite of the existence of two time-planes and the projection

of the dystopian society into a very distant future, the contemporary

"guardians" of Russia were not fooled by what the immediate target

was. On the basis of a few public readings We was recognized to be

a powerful satire of the regime and promptly denied publication. It
first appeared in Russian in 1927 in an emigre journal published in
Czechoslovakia, without the writer's consent. In 19x9, at the consol-
idation of Stalin's power, when the Benefactor and his death machine

"became too readily recognizable as living, immediate realities ... the
hounding of Zamiatin rose to a fever pitch."

12

With the intervention

of Gorky, Zamiatin received Stalin's permission to leave Russia for
France in 1931. The novel, first published in English in 1924, had a
greater effect on Western readers - although this, too, restricted to a
small circle - than on those extraterrestrial readers on "Venus, Mars,
Mercury" in the Russia of the 1920s, to whom its warnings were most

specifically addressed.

ALDOUS HUXLEY: BRAVE NEW WORLD

Like Zamiatin's We, Huxley's dystopia is a warning against adulation
of the machine. Nevertheless, a close study of Huxley's 1946 foreword
to his 1930 novel should dispel critical notions that Brave New World

is "the most powerful denunciation of the scientific world-view that
has ever been written"

13

and that, by rejecting the potential of a

technological future, Huxley urges us to a nostalgic, pastoral return
to Utopia in the Reservation.

14

There is no doubt that Brave New World - like the majority of dys-

topian fiction - evokes our sympathy with the protagonist who indeed
finally arrives at a "denunciation of the scientific world-view." But to
what extent does the fate of the protagonist express the satirist's intel-
lectual position? Does the Savage at any point suggest that he would

prefer the Reservation to the Brave New World of London 651 AF?
And to what extent is the Savage the mouthpiece of Huxley's norm of

sanity and good reason in the satire?

To answer these questions we begin by noting that Huxley carefully

imposes a point-counterpoint structure over the entire line of the
narrative, a structure delineating an extended debate conducive to a
Menippean satire of ideas. The entire novel is structured so as to pre-

pare us for the final clash between the Controller and the Savage, his
opponent, at the climactic scene of the subversive's trial, as if to flex
our intellectual muscles for the argument between the pros and cons,
the Utopian and the dystopian aspects of the scentific-tehnological
world of the World State in 651 A F , a debate whose outcome is essential
for setting our own directions for the future.

The Dictator behind the Mask 65

In this context, the narrative structure is predicated on the juxtapo-

sition of two oppposing mindsets, those of the Reservation and the
Brave New World of London six centuries after our time, in the
following pattern:

Chapters 1-6: Brave New World is introduced from a bird's-eye view.
Chapters 7-10: The Reservation
Chapters 11-15: Brave New World is revisited from the Savage's

point of view.
Chapters 16-17: The Trial

Chapter 18: Resolution and Retribution

The first six chapters introduce the Brave New World of London

651 AF, as it were from a bird's-eye view, without establishing the

emotional or a perceptual focus that usually comes with the reader's
identifying with the central character. Having no such focus, we are
on our own, left to ponder the strange society in which we have landed.
The first two paragraphs take us to the

"CENTRAL L O N D O N HATCH-

ERY AND C O N D I T I O N I N G CENTRE,"

carrying the World State's motto,

" C O M M U N I T Y , IDENTITY, STABILITY."

(15) Is there anything wrong

with these slogans, with their unmistakable hint of a latter-day version
of the triple slogan of the French Revolution and of democratic
socialism: Fraternity, Equality, and Liberty? Only if Community comes
to refer to the community of the anthill, Identity to being identical to
one another, and Stability to eternal stagnation.

Within the Huxleyan laboratory we immediately recognize the hard

metallic sheen, glassy glitter, and antiseptic whiteness familiar from the
Wellsian Utopia in images such as "a harsh thin light [that] glared
through the windows." But is the white here a symbol of purity, as in
hygiene and comfort, or is it associated with the whiteness of a blood-
less, soulless sterility, with the ghostly image of Coleridge's pale "death
in life"? We see further that in the laboratory "wintriness responded
to wintriness" and that "the overalls of the workers were white, their
hands gloved with a pale, corpse coloured rubber, [and that] the light
was frozen, dead, a ghost" (15). Still, although we are somewhat
shocked when we gradually find out that the "hatchery" refers to the
birth process of human beings, we are not quite sure yet whether we
have landed in the "good place" of Utopia or in its opposite.

In fact, up to the end of this section in the first six chapters, the

reader is tempted to anticipate that eventually Bernard Marx, the bril-
liant critic of the system, a brainy but physically flawed Alpha-plus,
may emerge as our central consciousness in the novel. It is only as we
see that he is an opportunist who gives up his critical stance as soon
as he becomes popular in the system that we tend to change our mind

66

Dystopia West

about the reliability of his point of view. By not having a central guide
up to the end of part 1, we are deliberately made to feel uncertain about
charting the direction of the writer's course between Utopia and dystopia.

In these first six chapters the reader is faced with a "cognitive

estrangement," hit by the strangeness of a society of test-tube babies
divided into castes according to the first five letters of the Greek
alphabet, of state-enforced promiscuity and state-directed addiction to
the drug soma, and of the most unabashedly hedonistic applications
of advanced technology. Still, to this point it has not become clear
whether the "strangeness" of this society has overwhelmingly negative
or positive connotations.

The second structural unit (chapters 7-10) takes us to the Reserva-

tion to create the counterpoint: it juxtaposes the ultramodern world
of London 651 AF (hypothetically the world of our distant future) and
the dirty, backward, unhygienic world of the Reservation (the repellent
world of our distant past). It is here that Lenina, the attractive Beta
heroine, spends a short, soma-protected holiday in the company of
that subversive intellectual Bernard Marx, and they meet young John,
himself born on the Reservation but from a mother who is an unwilling
exile from civilized London. When the couple decide to take these two
back to London, both mother and son are delighted: Linda's sexual
habits engendered in her birthplace scandalized the backward, violent
inhabitants of the Reservation, and John spent his young life alone as
an outcast, dreaming about distant London as Paradise.

There seems nothing to detain any of the characters - or us - in this

backward, primitive, and violent world of the Reservation or to
assume, at this point or later, that it is a pastoral world of Utopia.

The third structural unit (chapters 11 to 15) takes us to London

once again, but now we see it from the point of view of John, the
outsider, whom the people in London choose to call the Savage. He is
a sensitive, poetic young man, brought up on a stray volume of
Shakespeare that had somehow fallen into his hands in childhood. Full
of happy anticipation, he now greets London, the delightful home of
beautiful Lenina, as the miraculous "brave new world" that the inno-
cent Miranda greets in The Tempest after setting eyes on dashing young
Ferdinand. Within a short time, however, John grows more and more
disillusioned with all those aspects of this society we originally
regarded as strange but neutral. With him as our emotional guide, we
also recognize Brave New World for what it is, a nightmare of soulless
uniformity. In his growing disgust with this society the Savage decides
to "liberate" the Delta semi-morons, whom he sees as slaves to soma,
by starting to throw the drug out of the window and causing a riot.

As a result of his insubordination the Savage and his friends, Bernard

and Helmholtz, who participitated in the riot, have to face trial,

The Dictator behind the Mask 6j

described in great detail in chapters 17 and 18. Although at first glance
the trial seems more like "a caffeine solution party than a trial" (171),
and we see nothing of the fear of cruel physical punishment usually
associated with such scenes in dystopian fiction, these two chapters

still represent the thematic and structural climax of the novel: the
subversive's trial and the dictator's revelation of the machinery of
injustice at the heart of the dictatorship. In fact, at times it seems as

if Huxley must have written the rest of the novel - the fictional plot
often barely disguises his passion for ideas - for this opportunity to
dramatize an expository debate between two philosophical voices: the

voice in favour of this phantasmagorical world of live but soulless
robots produced on a biological assembly line, and the voice against
it. These two chapters of the trial clearly establish the thematic and

structural centre of the novel as Menippean satire.

Science is not denounced per se. Instead, Huxley denounces the

society where even the research scientist is prevented from pursuing
his research, where only "applied science" - that is, science applied to
serve the totalitarian state machine - is allowed to flourish. The story

the World Controller delivers at the trial is a clear illustration of this
point. To the amazement of Helmholtz, who aspires to the creativity
of Shakespeare but is allowed to write only propaganda jingles, the
Controller reveals that "it's not only art that's incompatible with

happiness; it's also science; we have to keep it most carefully chained
and muzzled [because] every change is a menace to stability ... Every
discovery is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be

treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science" (176).

As a young scientist the Controller himself wanted to follow a line

of experiments different from the guidelines in the "orthodox cookery
book" prescribed by the state. As a result he was tried and "given the

choice: to be sent to an island, where [he] could have got on with pure
science, or to be taken on to the Controller's Council with the prospect
of succeeding in due course to an actual Controllership. I chose this
and let science go" (178).

This is a point parallel to the Benefactor's revelation of his painful

task to Zamiatin's protagonist in We, when the High Priest reveals the
innermost secret of the dystopian state religion. Both scenes allude to
Dostoevski's allegory about the Grand Inquisitor. Should the Messiah

reappear, he would be a most dangerous threat to the institution of
the Church originally established in his name. Just as the Grand
Inquisitor justified his act of imprisoning Christ in the dungeons of the

Inquisition in the interest of the "happiness" of the masses, the Con-
troller justifies the silencing of the pursuit of truth in pure science,
since "truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as

it's been beneficient" (178). Just like the Grand Inquisitor, Huxley's

68

Dystopia West

Controller had also been forced to make an act of self-sacrifice; he
gave up his creative ambition and chose to enslave his talent to the
state because "happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's
happiness" (178).

At this point the Controller gives us one of the many clues to the

decoding of the satire: which trends that develop in the society of the
Ideal Reader in Huxley's time (which also happens to be Our Ford's
time on Earth) will prepare the world for what Huxley calls the

"horror" of Brave New World? In the Controller's words, "Our Ford

did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort
and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happi-
ness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't." It is
the lack of spirituality that we, Huxley's contemporaries, have come
to accept uncritically: we have given up truth and beauty in exchange

for the comforts and illusory "happiness" of hedonism.

At this stage of the subversives' trial the Controller's account of his

own sacrifice justifies his right to sentence Helmholtz Watson, the
would-be writer of Shakespearean tragedy, to lifelong exile: "Happiness
has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr Watson - paying because
you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much inter-
ested in truth: I paid too." The Controller fully understands Helmholtz's
desire to choose conflict and hardship to be able to "write better" (just
like Plato's Philosopher King, who was full of admiration for the tragic
poet when sentencing him to exile for reasons of state). When Helm-

holtz asks for an island with a "thoroughly bad climate," the Controller
expresses his approbation: "I like your spirit, Mr Watson. I like it very
much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove of it" (179).

Had we doubts about the era in which Huxley wrote the trial scene,

we could easily confuse it with an example of postmodern literature,
rich in irony, parody, playfulness, and ending with the "deconstruc-
tion" of its own premises. (Of course, such a sense of confusion

should by itself indicate that the ambiguities, complexities, and sur-
prises inherent in dimensional writing probably did not originate in
postmodern literature.)

The Controller, just like Zamiatin's Benefactor, justifies his role,

believing that he works for the benefit of humanity and is performing
a difficult task when, in the interest of Stability, he eliminates the
subversive. Both Zamiatin's Benefactor and Huxley's Controller rep-
resent the predicament of the Grand Inquisitor, the only person who
carries the burden of freedom in a society of happy slaves condi-
tioned "to love their servitude." Both stifle opportunities for change
and chance: their aim is to create a fully predictable, static, stagnant,

ultimately moribund society. Zamiatin's Benefactor undertakes the

The Dictator behind the Mask 69

painful task of acting as executioner to the subversive; Huxley's
Controller-Inquisitor executes the subversive within himself first.

It is in chapter 17, the second stage of the trial, that the Savage and

the Controller lock horns on the issues of pure versus applied science;
art versus propaganda; Shakespearean tragedy versus the inane mass
entertainment of jingles and "feelies"; romantic love versus state-
endorsed promiscuity; and true spirituality versus the soma-induced,
orgiastic state religion of "orgy-porgy." Of course, in the debate the
Savage has all the lines, and we simply cannot help but watch his

heroic struggle against overwhelming odds with a great deal of sym-
pathy. He concludes his debate with the all-powerful Controller by
announcing that he is ready to take all the pain and suffering of the
past in order to maintain what most of us would identify as the central
concept of being human, the choice of freedom over the state's deceptive

concept of happiness.

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I

want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right, then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be

unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right ... to
be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."

There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last. (187)

Had the novel ended at this point, Huxley would have left us with the
proposition that the world of the past is superior to the scientism of
the world of 651 A F , and the Savage would have left the stage as the
tragic hero. Equally important, Huxley would have settled the debate
between Technology and Nature clearly in favour of the latter.

But the novel does not end at this point.
In the last structural unit, chapter 18, we see the aftermath of the

Savage's trial, the consequences of his self-chosen sentence. Faced with
a choice between two equally maddening alternatives, to stay in Brave

New World or return to the Reservation, the Savage chooses solitude.
He hated the Reservation and was delighted to enter the Brave New

World of London, his mother's birthplace, about which he had dreamt
throughout his childhood as a secular heaven or paradise. But by the
end of his stay in London he has come to reject this world also.
Consequently, he is in what we would call a time-warp between our
distant past and our distant future; he has no place to go. Huxley
makes it quite clear that by rejecting the primitive horrors of the

70 Dystopia West

Reservation and the sophisticated ones in the London of 651 AF, the
Savage is left in a limbo; in fact, he has no choices. Enacting his
unresolvable philosophical dilemma, the Savage goes insane and finally
commits sucide: "Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass
needles, the feet turned towards the right: north, north-east, south-
east, south, south-south-west ..." (200). He is still unable, even in his

death, to find a resting place between his two equally horrible options.

Contrary to Eric Rabkin's or Edith Clowes' suggestion,

15

Huxley

does not end on a note of nostalgia, urging us to return to our distant
past as a Utopian pastoral, a Rousseauean "return to Nature." In
Huxley's own words from the foreword, the Savage "is made to retreat
from sanity; his native Penitente-ism reasserts its authority and he ends
in maniacal self-torture and despairing suicide" (8) - not exactly a note
of nostalgia or an invitation for us to follow his example.

Huxley makes it clear that even if the young man may be in many

ways closer to us than are the denizens of London 651 AF, he is also
a flawed human being who suffers from many of our typical psycho-
pathologies that Huxley cannot - and does not want to - present as
exemplary. Steeped in the concepts of Freudian depth psychology, the

intellectual currency of his time, Huxley shows the Savage to be
suffering from an Oedipal fixation; consequently, he is suffering from
guilt and chronic remorse, and for Huxley "chronic remorse ... is a
most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make
what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving

better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling
in the muck is not the best way of getting clean" (7).

At the end the Savage resorts to "maniacal self-torture"; he whips

himself, and finally commits suicide. Of course, he is locked into the
nightmare situation created by the monstrous future that we, the writer's
generation, have allowed to come about; ultimately we can blame only
ourselves for his insoluble dilemma. Nevertheless, in the light of Huxley's
last novel, Island, which, among other things, is a Utopia because it
heals the protagonist of the most serious signs of the psychopathology

of our age - guilt, remorse and self torture - it becomes clear that the
Savage is a representative of this pathology and the reader is not invited
to identify with him entirely.

Having been born on the Reservation and ostracized for Linda's

unorthodox sexual behaviour, understandably the lonely young boy
develops a strong Oedipal hatred for his mother's numerous lovers, as
well as a passionate need for her affection. When as a young man he
has a chance to make love to Lenina, the attractive young Beta woman
who also falls in love with him, the Savage rejects her, ostensibly

The Dictator behind the Mask 71

because he is full of the romantic notions he learned from Shakespeare's
poetry and therefore feels repelled by the impersonality implied in
Lenina's conditioning to be promiscuous because "everyone belongs to

everyone else." We should remember, however, that Lenina is not fol-
lowing her conditioning in this instance. Although she cannot put this
into words, her feelings also turn her into a subversive: she finds her
feelings for the Savage quite different from those she had for others
earlier, and she is also willing to take unusual risks for him. She takes
the initiative by visiting the young man and risking his rejection. (As

we see in the last chapter of the novel, she returns to him after his trial
as if drawn to him irresistibly, even after being violently rejected.) In
this scene Huxley makes us look further to shed light on something in
the Savage's behaviour that may not be fully explained by the unbrid-
gable difference between the Savage's words of love, inspired by Shakes-
peare, and Lenina's jingles, inspired by the likes of Helmholtz Watson.

It is at the end of this tragicomic scene, so confusing and frustrating

for both young people, that the Savage receives a call from the hospital
that his mother is dying. In his behaviour at his mother's deathbed
Huxley reveals the psychological reason for the young man's earlier

rejection of Lenina. John the Savage is locked into the childhood
Oedipal relationship with his mother, a neurotic condition that keeps
him unable to engage in a relationship with a woman of his own age
and also makes him suffer from neurotic guilt.

Still upset by the scene with Lenina, and anguished about his

mother's condition in the hospital, the Savage is hit by the "intermi-
nable stream" of identical twins with the "nightmare ... of their faces,
their repeated face" (159), as they are brought to the ward of the dying
for their "death conditioning," encouraged to observe the dying Linda
with impudent indifference. Now, as the young man's confusion,
anguish, and anger come to a boiling point, in her soma-induced
stupour Linda mistakes her son for her former lover, Pope. In a jealous

rage that is aggravated by his emotional turmoil, his son begins to
shake her, angry to get her attention. Linda dies in his arms, and the
former turmoil of the young man's emotions is transformed into violent
grief and remorse. This guilt becomes intermingled with feelings for
Lenina and with his childhood hatred of his mother's lover, his rival.

To relieve his guilt, he suddenly transfers his attention to the Deltas
by making a mental connection. In his mind the slavery imposed on
Linda's mind and soul by soma is forcibly connected with the enslave-
ment of a group of Delta adults before him, who are awaiting their

weekly soma distribution. It is to "atone" for Linda's death that he
sets out to "liberate" the Delta semi-morons by throwing their soma

72-

Dystopia West

The Dictator behind the Mask

73

portions out of the window - that is, it is the Savage's psychological
misery that makes him turn to political action, and Huxley shows that
such action is, not surprisingly, doomed to miscarry.

John the Savage is clearly an allusion to Rousseau's concept of the

Noble Savage, and in referring to the Deltas, the young man also
echoes Rousseau's words to "force them to be free." But does this
mean that Huxley advocates a Rousseauean "return to nature," or

simply that he shows that the old-fashioned nobility of the Savage,
uncorrupted by this society, is bound to come to a sad end here? In
the context of the novel John Savage has no ties left with the Reser-
vation: he never regarded it as his Utopian destination or his spiritual

home to return to.

In contrast to the political options opened up by meta-utopia, Edith

Clowes argues, classics of the dystopian genre arrive at an "either/or"
solution that of necessity urges the reader to return to the past and be
willing to give up hope of social change.

16

I suggest, however, that if

we juxtapose the Controller's intellectual argument in favour of science
and advanced technology to the Savage's counter-argument, the Savage

does not necessarily emerge as the winner. By giving us a convincing
picture of the Savage's psychological disease, which results in neurotic
guilt and remorse, Huxley also tends to undermine the validity of the

Savage's political-intellectual position. By setting up a debate between
two opposite poles and showing that there can be no winners, Huxley
leaves the reader with a position not of "either/or" but of "neither/
nor," and ultimately with a desire to search for a third alternative. I
also suggest that the urgent invitation that we search for the third
alternative is typical of the strategies of great satire in general, and of

dystopian satire in particular.

In his 1946 foreword to the novel Huxley sheds light on the

responses expected from the Ideal Reader by pointing out that "the
Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia,
or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human
in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal" (7).

For the Huxley of 1930, a young writer with a strong philosophical
and satirical bent, the idea "that human beings are given free will in
order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the
other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly
true"(4). However, when returning to the same questions in his 1946

foreword, he writes:

If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative.
Between the Utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the
possibility of sanity - a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a

community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within
the borders of the Reservation. In this community economics would be decen-
tralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and cooperative. Science
and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been
made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World)
as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. (8)

Clearly, for Huxley this "third alternative" would be the only sane
alternative, in contrast to both forms of insanity outlined in the distant
past of the Reservation and in the distant hypothetical future in the
London of 651 AF. And the essential feature of this sane alternative,
Huxley writes, would be the spiritual awareness that "the Greatest
Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle -
the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life
being: 'How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with,
the achievement ... of man's Final End?'" (9). On this point, Orwell's
essay on "Pleasure Spots" arrives at a remarkably similar definition of
the "happiness" provided by science and industrialism: "Man needs
warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security: he also needs solitude,
creative work and a sense of wonder ... If he recognizes this, he could
use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying
always the same test: Does this make me more or less human?"

17

Brave New World is not necessarily a "denunciation of the scientific

world-view," as Kumar would have us believe. As Huxley (and Orwell)
would say, humanity should partake of the advantages of science, but
since science can be used not only to enslave nature but also to enslave
human beings by turning them into machines, it should not be used
indiscriminately; science can be beneficial only if it is used in harmony
with a human being's "Final End," if it meets the test each time Orwell's

question is applied: "Does this make me more or less human?" If used
to uphold the fundamental principles of humanism, Huxley suggests,
science could be instrumental in building a real Utopia, "to use applied
science not as the end to which human beings are to be made the
means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals" (14).

As Huxley explains further, the theme of the book "is not the

advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it
affects human individuals" (9). This is to say, what he objects to in the

World State of Brave New World is not the phenomenon of scientific

or technological progress but the dehumanization of the individual
that could - but does not necessarily have to - follow.

Of course, Huxley's and Orwell's standard of sanity is that of human-

ism, based on the assumption that there could be a consensus on what
the human being's Final End is, that there is universal agreement on the

74

Dystopia West

The Dictator behind the Mask

75

question of what makes one human - concepts many a postmodern critic,
sadly, I think, would have difficulty recognizing, let alone endorsing.

Yet such a humanistic norm, based on a consensus of reason, is the

foundation of Huxley's dystopian satire, implying also the norm for
sanity - ultimately the modern equivalent of the goal of the "good
place." As he wrote in 1946, just after the Second World War had

ended: "Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible.
On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly convinced than in the
past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it
can be achieved and would like to see more of it" (8).

He is particularly careful here in describing the mental state of the

rulers of Brave New World, who "may not be sane ... but they are
not madmen and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in
order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the
ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution." This revolution,

Huxley explains, goes beyond the political and economic revolutions
to that "in the souls and flesh of human beings" (10).

This is the revolution that the "bad places" of Zamiatin's We and

Huxley's Brave New World explore. Both deal with what Huxley calls

"'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making

people love their servitude, ... the result of a deep, personal revolution
in human minds and bodies" (13). This is also Orwell's ultimate fear
of the unprecedented scientific power at the disposal of modern dicta-
torships, their ability to alter human nature, as readily "to produce a

breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of
hornless cows."

18

Comparing his own vision with that of Nineteen Eighty-four in a

1949 letter to Orwell, Huxley argues that his own scenario of the

painless, seductive, hedonistic nature of future dictatorships is more
probable. Already in his 1946 foreword he points out that in the novel
of 1930 he "projected [the horror of the future] six hundred years into
the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon
us within a single century" (14).

But within the universal target of the warning inspired by a tragic
humanism, what is Huxley's more specific satirical target?

In his Dystopian Impulse Keith Booker suggests that Brave New

World "is the classic bourgeois dystopia ... which depicts a future soci-

ety so devoted to capitalist ideals that its central hero is Henry Ford."
Although Booker also admits that Huxley's novel "incorporates numer-
ous elements of Communism into his dystopian vision,"

19

he leaves the

innate contradiction - a classically bourgeois dystopia, with capitalist
ideals that incorporate elements of Communism - unresolved.

A closer look at the text indicates that Marxists or neo-Marxists

should have trouble justifying the use of the word "capitalist" for
Huxley's novel. In Brave New World there is no private property; the
workers have reached a comfortable living standard and a sense of
eternal well-being; no one is exploited economically (in fact, if the state

wanted to, it could eliminate human labour altogether). The means of
production and the goods produced are not in the hands of the
capitalist: although the World State has not introduced a classless
society, it has definitely eliminated class distinctions based on money
or property, and has fulfilled Marx's central criterion of Communism,

"from everyone according to his ability, to everyone according to his

needs." (Of course, the World State is fully capable of creating a perfect
equilibrium between needs and abilities in the human specimen within
each caste that it chooses to manufacture on the biological assembly
line, an equilibrium also enforced by early childhood conditioning. By
having the World State embrace Marx's criteria and incorporate these
into its nightmarish state machinery of injustice, Huxley makes the

point that Marx's universal reign of justice is not at all guaranteed by
the simple elimination of economic injustice, as Marx believed. Its
critique of Marxism, of course, does not yet make the novel a bour-
geois dystopia advocating capitalist ideals, as suggested by Booker.)

As for Henry Ford, he incidentally plays a role quite different from

"a central hero"; he is the deity chosen by the World State, referred

to as

OUR FORD,

not for living up to the "capitalist ideal" of making

a great deal of money but for being the first to introduce the assembly
line. This is the Fordian invention that the World State has taken over
and developed to the point where human beings can be manufactured
according to the state's "engineering" specifications in test tubes, that
is, on a biological assembly line. As we noted in the discussion of
Zamiatin's We, in the twenties and thirties Ford was also worshipped
in the Soviet Union, together with Taylor, the inventor of time-and-
motion studies and the Table of Hours, which created the perfect

ideology for turning human beings into robots. In this sense the
worship of Our Ford in the London of 651 AF is not in itself an
indication either of capitalism or of Communism; rather, the World
State is presented to us as a society that has fulfilled the nineteenth
century's Utopian dream of a marriage between science and socialism,
and we are to see how sadly this dream is wanting.

In fact, Huxley's strategies borrow a great deal from the Soviet

experience of Taylorism and Fordism. As he points out elsewhere,

"interestingly, it is the new Soviet state, rather than America, which

has shown the Fordian impulse in its clearest form ... The Bolsheviks
here are only indicating the tendencies apparent in all mass democracies,

j6 Dystopia West

to organize the whole of society according to the dictates and the image
of the machine." As one reads Huxley's description of the Soviet
attitude to the machine, his comments sound like a summary of We,
including Zamiatin's satirical point about his protagonist who became

"encumbered" with a soul, a serious disease in the "factory" of the
One State. But Huxley's comments also shed light on his satirical

allusions to the Messiah of science and socialism: "To the Bolshevik
idealist, Utopia is undistinguishable from one of Mr Ford's factories.
It is not enough, in their eyes, that men should spend only eight hours
a day under the workshop discipline. Life outside the factory must be

exactly like life inside. Leisure must be as highly organized as toil ...
The condition of their entry into the Bolsheviks' Earthly Paradise is
that they shall have become like machines."

20

As for the enforced promiscuity in Brave New World, Huxley "car-

ries out to its logical end the Bolshevik precept that 'sex should be
taken as a drink of water.'"

21

Indeed, Huxley establishes a grotesque

association between the leaders of the Russian Revolution and the
unhampered sexuality in London 651 AF by having the Director, in
the course of a lecture to his students about the benefits of "erotic
play" among young children, point at a little girl called Polly Trotsky

(36), and by naming the woman embodying the state-enforced promis-

cuity of this dictatorship Lenina.

It is also worth pointing out that having overthrown traditional

religion, for

OUR LORD

the World State has substituted not only

OUR

FORD

but also

OUR FREUD;

in fact, Huxley tells us, these two names

are used "interchangeably." To appropriate the insights of depth psy-
chology - the workings of the subconscious and the role of sexual
repression in causing neurosis - is as important to the World State for
its enslavement of human beings through conditioning and sleep teach-
ing as is the application of the biological assembly line with the test-
tube babies for genetic control.

I would suggest that to see Brave New World from its proper

perspective, we should probably concentrate on its strategies as a
Menippean satire, that is, as a satire of ideas. First of all, it is a satire

of the two great dreams by which the nineteenth century defined
humanity's Utopian hope of finding redemption from the problems
created by the Industrial Revolution. These dreams were science and
socialism, as most clearly defined in the Wellsian Utopia, a "complex
mechanized society of the future run by a scientific elite."

22

In the

ideology followed by Huxley's World State, the twofold dream is
allowed to run its full course and turn into a nightmare by being
carried to its absolute conclusion.

The Dictator behind the Mask

77

Huxley indicates that it was a dream that concentrated only on

material progress, was narrowly utilitarian, and was hence lacking in
spiritual dimension. Indeed, in the London of 651 AF we come across
Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, all the great names associated with the socialist
revolution (or even with revolution in general, as indicated by the name
of Bonaparte). We also come across the great names in science, the
physicist Helmholtz, the psychologist Watson, as well as Darwin and

Freud. It seems, then, that the World State of 651 AF has fulfilled the
two-pronged Utopian dream of the nineteenth century. But what has
happened to this pantheon of "heroic materialism" in the process? It
is a society that can no longer produce, or tolerate, genius; it is a world
of mediocrities at best. One has only to look at the whining, cowardly
Bernard Marx, the almost totally mindless Lenina, the insignificant
little Polly Trotsky, not to mention the unsavoury journalist Darwin
Bonaparte and the emotional engineer Helmholtz Watson, whose cre-
ativity is thwarted by the system, to see that they are all mediocrities.

Just as we have seen in the phalanstery scene of Madach's The Tragedy

of Man, where Plato is punished for daydreaming, once the great
designs for Utopia have been translated into practice, the inventor-
genius himself falls victim to the uniformity imposed on people by his
own design. All that this "brave new world" can produce are medi-
ocrities: there is no tolerance for the spontaneity of the creative mind
once the dream of the earlier geniuses has been realized.

Plato's idea of justice also returns in Huxley's "horror" world in its

cruel parody. As we may remember, Plato's definition of justice depended
on the concept of harmony between gold, silver, and iron - that is, a
harmony within the hierarchy of lower and higher attributes in the
personality and of the lower and higher classes in society. In Huxley's
world the scientist guarantees this harmony by making sure that human
beings are produced genetically and conditioned through their early
years to "fit" their pre-established status as Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gam-
mas, and Epsilons. Paradoxically, by the very act of predetermining each
human being's physiological, mental, and psychological makeup, the

scientist commits the gravest act of injustice: the elimination of free will
and individuality, the essential components of being human.

At the same time, by deliberately applying the principle of more and

more severely arrested development to produce human beings for the
lower and lower social echelons, the scientist also makes use of the
insight that, during its gestation, the human foetus re-enacts the evolu-
tion of the species. Once more the scientist deliberately reverses the
principle of evolution into a principle of enforced retardation for the
majority, in order to achieve the unchanging stability of the World State.

78 Dystopia West

Still, I would suggest that what Huxley denounces here is not the

tradition of Utopian socialism or the scientific world-view: neither the
dream of socialism nor that of science is demonstrated here as evil in

itself. The society created in 651 AF is dystopic because it functions
as the fulfilment of an exclusively materialistic dream, where the
original goals of liberating mankind and establishing universal justice
- a precondition of individual freedom - are deliberately reversed.

There is no doubt that Brave New World, just like Zamiatin's We and

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, expresses the writer's fear about the sur-
vival of our species in terms of what the humanist defines as the essential
qualities of being human. All three novels present us with the paradigm
of a totalitarian state as an enormous laboratory for the transformation
of human nature, the birthing process of creatures no longer human.
In We the centre of this transformation is the Great Operation of fan-
tasectomy and the fear of the Benefactor's Machine that can literally

"liquidate" - that is, turn into water - the heretic with a live imagina-

tion. In Brave New World the essence of the state machine is repre-
sented by the Hatchery, in which human beings are decanted at various

stages of arrested development. In Nineteen Eighty-four the essence of
the state machine is revealed, appropriately, in the torture chamber, at
the last stage in Winston's seven-year trial, where he finally receives
O'Brien's answer to his gnawing question: "I understand how; I don't
understand why."

GEORGE ORWELL: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

In Zamiatin's One State and Huxley's World State, the twofold dream
about the new Messiah as the incarnation of science and socialism is
allowed to run its full course and turn into a nightmare by being
carried to its absurd conclusion. By contrast, Nineteen Eighty-four

shows us that the same twofold dream was deliberately betrayed by
those who assumed power in its name. Although science in 1984 is
sufficiently advanced to improve the lot of people all over the world,
and the three totalitarian superpowers have achieved a peaceful equi-
librium among themselves, the three dictators deliberately create the
fiction of unceasing war between two of the three partners so that they
can "use up the products of the machine without raising the general
standard of living" (166). They know that dictatorships can exist only
when the masses are held in poverty and ignorance. Science is used

here only for perpetrating terror - that is, for designing weapons
against a fictitious enemy and for perfecting psychological methods to
break down the individual's private conscience and consciousness. As
for the alleged goal of the socialist paradise, O'Brien, this most cynical

The Dictator behind the Mask

79

of Grand Inquisitors, admits his contempt for those "cowards and
hypocrites who pretended, perhaps ... even believed, that they had
seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around
the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and
equal." O'Brien is convinced that "no one seizes power with the
intention of relinquishing it ... One does not establish a dictatorship
in order to safeguard a revolution: one makes the revolution in order
to establish the dictatorship" (211).

The Wellsian dream of "a future society unbelievably rich, leisured,

orderly and efficient [that had been] part of the consciousness of every
literate person" (166) was betrayed by the new rulers who emerged at
the world crisis of the 1950s. But Orwell makes it clear that the people
who allowed the totalitarian dictatorship to come to power were also
responsible for accepting, even justifying, the betrayal of the dream. The
power-hungry new elite was able to come to power only because "by
the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of polit-
ical thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discred-
ited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new
political theory, whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and
regimentation" (177). Consequently, with the help of the new electronic
technology, the Inner Party met with little resistance in enforcing "not
only complete obedience to the will of the state but complete uniformity
of opinion" (177). To understand Orwell's satirical target, we should
recognize that throughout the novel the satirist is engaged in argument
with an Adversary, the self-deceived leftist intellectual in the West, who
refuses to admit that socialism has been betrayed in the

USSR,

and who

refuses to acknowledge, or finds excuses for, Stalin's terror.

If for Huxley totalitarian dictatorship is defined by the terror of

science, for Orwell it is defined by the science of terror, the systematic
and sophisticated perpetration of violence directed by the Inner Party
against its own people in the name of socialist ideals. Yet Orwell
emphasizes that Nineteen Eighty-four was not intended "as an attack
on Socialism or the British Labour Party (of which I am a sup-
porter)."

13

Orwell's bitter satire of Stalin's system does not signify

disillusionment with the socialist ideal, rather concern about the
betrayal of this ideal. In fact, Orwell claims, "nothing has contributed
so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief
that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rule must be
excused if not imitated. And so for the past ten years I have been
convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we
wanted the revival of the Socialist movement" (my italics).

24

While Huxley gives the world over six hundred years to reach the

horrors of the World State, in Nineteen Eighty-four, written in 1948,

8o

Dystopia West

The Dictator behind the Mask

8 1

Orwell's warning about the future has an urgency that relates to
imminent danger. Huxley wrote his novel in 1930, before Hitler had
come to power and before the Moscow trials - that is, before the full
disclosure of the extent of the political terror that we now associate
with totalitarianism. Also, with the emergence of the "spheres of
influence" after the Second World War, Orwell had good reason to

fear the threat posed by the superpowers to the autonomy of smaller
countries, and to the autonomy of the individual within the giant state.
At the beginning of the Cold War, Orwell anticipated a crisis among
the superpowers some time in the 1950s, after which the atom bomb
might act as a deterrent to further wars, so that the status quo of three
totalitarian giants in perfect equilibrium would have to remain unchal-

lenged. Another thing Huxley could not have been concerned about
in 1930 was the curious paradox in Western public opinion in the late

1940s, known as the "Stalingrad syndrome"; many a Westerner's

sympathy for the Soviet people, who sacrificed millions of lives to save
the world from fascism, was uncriticially transferred to the Soviet
leaders, as if these were not the same leaders who were responsible
for the terror within the

USSR,

which sent further and further millions

of the Soviet people to forced-labour camps and their ultimate destruc-
tion. Orwell felt that such an uncritical transference of sympathy was
tantamount to accepting, justifying, and even desiring to emulate
totalitarian methods - a way of thinking he parodies in the mental

disease of "blackwhite," a deliberate "falsification" of the thought
process he also calls "crimestop," or "protective stupidity," all of them
symptoms of the "organized schizophrenia" of Doublethink. With his
increasing concern about a potential crisis, to Orwell the Western
intellectuals' adulation of Stalin indicated their willingness to internal-

ize the totalitarian mentality and betray the chances of establishing
democratic socialism in the West. In such a political climate, when

"the British public are wholly unaware of the true state of Russia and

imagine that it is some [kind of a] workers' Utopia,"

15

Orwell believed

that "the willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intel-
lectual honesty."

16

If we read, with Winston, the children's history book he picks up in

his neighbour's apartment, it becomes obvious that when Big Brother
came to power in the 1950s, he borrowed his slogans from Stalin; as
for his methods of terror and persecution, these have been clearly

borrowed from both Hitler and Stalin. "Fascism," Orwell points out
in argument with his self-deceived intellectual Adversary, "is often
loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see
nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin ... All of them
are worshipping power and successful cruelty."

17

Through Winston's fate we become fully aware of the gratuitous

cruelty implied by the state religion that worships God as Power. By
the end of Winston's trial through the various torture chambers
enwombed within the Ministry of Love, O'Brien declares himself the
Priest of Power and reveals that "the object of persecution is persecu-
tion. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power"
(2x7). Here Orwell's brilliant insight into the dynamics of totalitarian
dictatorship that is centred in the torture chamber essentially coincides

with the diagnosis of Hannah Arendt, that the "real secret, the con-
centration camps, fulfill the function of laboratories in the experiment
of total domination." Arendt's conclusion that totalitarian dictatorship
relies on the deliberate perpetration of terror as the style, "the very
essence of government,"

18

is also echoed by Albert Camus, who defines

the universe Stalin created under the camouflage of building socialism
as "a universe of terror - terror and trial."

19

In fact, Winston's personal predicament could be said to be acted

out between two trials: the show-trials of three of the former leaders
of the Party, Rutherford, Aaronson, and Jones, which Winston remem-
bers from the 1970s, and Winston's own trial in 1984. The novel

introduces Winston as a somewhat sickly, middle-aged man deeply
afraid of the inevitable trial and punishment awaiting the "thought
criminal." Yet, since his work in the Ministry of Truth consists of
doctoring the documents of the past in order to make them agree with
the ever-changing pronouncements of Big Brother in the present, he is
obsessed with the need to find out the truth in a society where

"everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was

forgotten, the lie became truth." This is why he feels compelled to
explore simultaneously the political history of Oceania and his own
personal history, while he keeps dreaming about an escape into the
political and sexual freedom of the Golden Country (part 1).

In spite of his fear, he goes further and further in resisting the regime

that denies the individual's right to know the truth about the past, just
as it denies the right to think, to feel, to write down ideas, or to create
a private bond of loyalty and love. Given his fear of his inevitably
cruel trial, when Winston forges a forbidden relationship with Julia
and subsequently joins the Underground with her, the character of this
unexceptional Everyman assumes tragic-heroic dimensions. (When,
during his interrogation, he stands up for the Spirit of Man against

the God of Power, he reveals the same tragic-heroic courage.)

Winston knows, the moment he opens his diary, that he is committing

"thought crime" and his act cannot remain undetected by the Thought

Police. Having seen in his twenties the victims of the public trials,

"outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to

82 Dystopia West

extinction," Winston knows full well that "no one who had once fallen
into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end" (69).
Still, part 1 ends on a note of mystery: "When once you have suc-
cumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would

be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie
embedded in future time?" Speculating about the nature of that mys-
terious horror, his attention wanders to the three Party slogans that
are phrased like riddles asking for a solution:"

WAR IS PEACE, FREE-

D O M IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." He knOWS all his
questions relate to his desire to understand not only the methods but
also the motivation for the Party's actions - "I understand how - I
don't understand why" - and intuitively he turns to the omnipresent
portrait of Big Brother for an answer. He is, however, confronted only
with yet another aspect of the same puzzle: "The face gazed up at him,
heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath
the dark moustache?" (92.).

By the end of the novel Winston will find out the answer to all three

riddles, and will also find out that they are interconnected, each
revealing a different aspect of the central mystery: by facing the

"horror [that had been] embedded in future times" all along, in Room
101 he also finds out that the horror of the real face behind Big

Brother's benevolent mask is that of the insatiable God of Power who
demands the recurring ritual of human sacrifice.

Reading Goldstein's Book, Winston learns that

WAR IS PEACE

means

that war is a pretence, a "fiction," "an imposture." After the war in
the 1950s, with the help of the atom bomb that only superpowers
could afford to manufacture, the modern world was divided among
three totalitarian dictatorships. The perfect, unchangeable equilibrium
among the three has created the precondition for world peace. How-
ever, each dictator has been pretending to be at war all the time because

only continual war gives him the excuse to keep his own population
enslaved, undernourished, overworked, as well as in a permanent state
of fear of the "satanic" enemy and traitor, and consequently ready to
worship the dictator as the Saviour. In effect, it is Big Brother - or the
Inner Party that rules in his name - that acts as the only real enemy
or traitor, conspiring against the welfare of his own people. To cover
up for this, Big Brother wears the mask of the benevolent protector
and saviour, and the Ministry of Truth fabricates the most sophisti-
cated lies of propaganda to prove that he is benevolent and infallible.
To prevent people from testing these blatant lies, the Thought Police
intimidate "thought criminals" with the threat of trial and interrogation
in the Ministry of Love.

The Dictator behind the Mask 83

F R E E D O M

is

SLAVERY,

as O'Brien explains to Winston at his trial,

means that only by enslaving his mind and soul to the Party can the
individual become part of the Party's collective immortality and there-
fore free from modern man's anguish about personal mortality. But the
last slogan,

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,

will become clear to Winston

only after his final ordeal in Room 101, located in the Ministry of Love

"as deep as it was possible to go" in human degradation. It is here that

each individual victim is faced with the particular version of psycho-
logical pressure that his or her psyche can no longer sustain, until the
personality breaks down and the victim betrays others, including his
nearest and dearest. Those betrayed will, in turn, also be broken until

they betray others - hence the chain reaction of betrayals and denun-
ciations that fuels the state machinery with newer and newer victims.

To appreciate Orwell's unique achievement in combining depth psy-

chology with political satire in his analysis of totalitarianism, we should
examine the following questions: Why in Room 101 does the Party
require from Winston that he offer up Julia as a human sacrifice to be
devoured by the starved rats in their cage? And why are the rats the
inevitable choice for Winston's final humiliation and annihilitation?

30

Answers to these questions spring from the fact that the scene in

Room 101 is, in effect, the re-enactment of a previous crisis. It relates
to that significant childhood "memory that [Winston] must have delib-
erately pushed out of his consciousness over many years" (142,), a

repression that made him suffer from recurring guilt dreams and a
number of psychosomatic symptoms for almost thirty years. After his

"breakthrough dream," he remembers and relives this painful, shame-

ful scene in detail, when, as a starving child, he "snatched" the last

piece of chocolate out of his starving sister's hand "and was fleeing
for the door ... His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed
its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his
sister was dying" (144-5). I* is

t n e

mother's protective gesture around

her dying child that Winston has seen on the screen of a "flick" that
triggers the first vague memory that compels him to start writing in
the diary. Once he starts the process of writing, Winston also has
several dreams, until the repressed memory gradually surfaces and he
understands its significance. As he discusses this memory with Julia,

he realizes that, although he could not have caused his mother's death

- it was the Party that vapourized her - he was none the less guilty.
When, in his uncontrollable hunger, the child Winston snatched away
the last piece of food from his starving mother and sister, he betrayed
his love for them by willing their death, as if ready to devour them to
appease his own hunger. Just as important, he realizes that with Julia

8

4

Dystopia West

he has another chance to forge an emotional and spiritual bond based
on private loyalty and devotion. To liberate himself from the past and
expiate the guilt, this is his second chance. The lost Paradise of
childhood can be regained by re-entering Paradise with Julia in the

Golden Country.

Betrayal, guilt, striving for redemption, and inevitable damnation at

the trial form the spiritual-psychological leitmotiv of Winston's story.
Winston's phobia of the rats - creatures who attack sick and dying
people and, when driven to madness by being starved, are willing to
devour their own species - is connected with that part of Winston's own
psyche that awaits behind that horrifying "wall of darkness" after the
walls of the personality - the basis of our humanity - are broken down.
When in Room 101 O'Brien presents him with the masklike cage of the

starved rats, in his uncontrollable fear and horror Winston is forced to
break through the walls of darkness, until he faces another, by now final
breakdown and re-enacts his childhood act of betrayal. When he
screams "Do it to Julia! Not me, Julia!" symbolically, once more, he
offers up the body of the only person he loves as a surrogate for his
own. By allowing himself to be degraded to the level of the starving
rats, he has become what he most abhorred; O'Brien's laboratory exper-

iment in the science of domination has been successful: Winston is
turned into a will-less, obedient instrument in the hands of the Party.

Politically, Winston's capitulation was preordained by the totalitar-

ian regime. Room 101 is at the heart of the novel because it is the
centre of the psychosis of betrayal; it is here that any victim can be

broken down and turned into the victimizer of others by being forced
to give up his private bond of loyalty, his private conscience, his private
self. Having gone through this process, Winston is ready to join in the
collective insanity imposed upon the population by Big Brother, as if
joining all the other starved rats in their cage. Ultimately the real face
behind the masklike cage is the face of Big Brother, the God of Power.
It is Big Brother himself who turns his subjects into hate-filled brutes

like himself, forcing them to act out his prime betrayal as the further
and further repetition of ritual human sacrifice. Winston's own final,
crucial act of betrayal is some kind of horrible imitatio dei; in the
moment he betrays his loved one, he becomes one with the godhead,
acting out the inevitable yet horrible mystery, the loving union between
victim and victimizer.

31

This is the horror that had to lie embedded in

the future, the secret of Big Brother's horrible smile hiding behind the

dark moustache. It is the smile of that cruel deity, the God of Power,
who transforms his victims into his own image.

The psychological dimension of the novel does not contradict but

gives vital support to the political analysis, and is indispensable to the

The Dictator behind the Mask 85

humanistic warning: since totalitarianism is built on the self-perpetuating
lies of false charges and false confessions and on the unstoppable chain
reaction of betrayals in the political arena, it also leads to the irreversible
disintegration of the individual's "inner heart," the core of private love,
conscience, and loyalty.

The central instrument through which the Inner Party can reassert

its grip over the population is the ritual of the trial. Private trials like
Winston's are largely the re-enactment of the scenario established by
the public show-trials of such former leaders of the Party as Aaronson,
Rutherford, and Jones. Like Stalin's Moscow trials in the 1930s, these
public theatricals are staged by the Party to create hatred against ever
newer categories of scapegoats and, at the same time, to discourage
anyone from opposing Big Brother. Working in the Ministry of Truth
in the 1970s, Winston had held in his hand a document that proved
that Aaronson, Rutherford, and Jones had been innnocent; they were
forced to make public confessions to the most phantasmagorical
charges. It is widely known in Oceania that the trial consists of being
coerced into confession, but the population practise Doublethink: they
know and do not accept the facts of knowing. After the defendants are

broken by torture and make their public confessions, they are released,
given a sinecure, and then rearrested and executed by a bullet in the
back of the head. For Orwell's contemporaries these details are unmis-
takably allusions to the phantasmagorical fabrications of the Moscow
trials of the 1930s, through which Stalin wiped out the former leaders
of the Party and the army whom he considered his potential rivals for
power. Orwell's point is that his Adversary engages in a potentially
disastrous practice of Doublethink when refusing to acknowledge the
deliberate miscarriage of justice behind Stalin's conceptual show-trials,
which were followed by mass arrests and the deportation of millions
to Siberia.

But the satirist also transplants the Moscow show-trials to British

soil, moving them from the 1930s to the 1970s, just as he transplants
Stalin's persecution of Trotsky to Big Brother's persecution of Goldstein.
He also transfers "the period of the great purges in which the original
leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all" from the

1930s in the

USSR

to the 1960s in England. "By 1970 none of them

was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been
exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries, Goldstein had fled and
was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply
disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular
public trials at which they made confession of their crimes." Orwell
suggests here, in 1948, that the power-hungry Inner Party that came
to power in Oceania in the 1950s is willing not only to condone but

86

Dystopia West

also to imitate the Soviet historical example, step by step, as it were,
and on an even larger scale.

Symbolically, the rituals of Hate Week and the daily rituals of the

Two-Minute Hate are also trials, where the Party gives the population

a chance to publicly condemn those already singled out to be sacrificed
by the Party, providing thereby intermittent catharsis for the under-
nourished, overworked, frustrated population. The Party provides such

a catharsis on a recurring basis to accomplish the emotional conversion
of the people's fear and repressed hatred of Big Brother into hatred of
the enemey and the traitor, and then, by the "fiat" of Doublethink,
the conversion of the hysterical hatred for the Party-appointed "Satan"

into hysterical "love" for Big Brother, the Saviour. The best illustration
of this process is the Hate Week demonstration at Victory Square,
when the Party decides to switch the enemy in the middle of the
expressions of orgiastic hatred; the hate goes on, as if the population

did not even notice the switch - as if, indeed, they were not interested
in whom they are asked to hate, condemn, destroy.

The ritual arousal of hate at these various trials assumes the barbaric

connotations of the medieval witches' trials and the mass hysteria of
witch-hunts. The forced confessions of the "traitors" and "heretics"

in Oceania reveal the same cliches, the same blatant disregard for the
physical rules of the natural world, the same sense of "sur-realite
revealed by an imaginary universe"

32

as the confessions obtained by

medieval witches' trials. At the trial of Rutherford, Aaronson, and

Jones, Winston observes, "very likely the confessions had been rewrit-

ten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest
significance" (71). When Winston wants to terminate his own torture

at the Ministry of Love, he repeats all the same grotesque cliches,
admits to all the "crimes" impossible for anyone to have committed,
that he knows to be associated with the vocabulary of deviation: "He
confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribu-

tion of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of
military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he was a
religious believer, an admirer of capitalism, a sexual pervert" (209).

Like Aaronson, Rutherford, and Jones, Winston is also released after

his "trial" and given a sinecure, allowed to spend his time in the
notorious Chestnut Cafe, the haunt of those broken men who have
been made to betray themselves by betraying those closest to them.
After his release from Room 101 Winston is no longer able to feel, to

remember, to dream. When, uncalled for, a happy memory emerges
from his childhood, he dismisses it as a "false memory."

Sitting in the Chestnut Cafe, Winston knows that, like other "thought

criminals," he will be rearrested and shot with the inevitable bullet in
the back. But he is so completely transformed by now that he can no

The Dictator behind the Mask 87

longer even dream about getting away from Oceania into the Golden
Country: instead, he celebrates the light-flooded corridor leading to the

torture chamber as if this were now the fulfilment of his wishdream of
the Golden Country. Finally, while listening to the announcements of
the Party's latest victory, not only is Winston willing to obey the state
religion; he also has become a true believer. Wiping out every memory
of his rebellious past, of his outrage over Big Brother's atrocious mis-
carriage of justice, of his love for Julia and his mother, Winston reaches

the ultimate stage expressed by the last slogan:

IGNORANCE IS

STRENGTH.

He no longer abhors, he worships the tyrant. He has

learned to practice Doublethink; he genuinely "loves" Big Brother. This
also means that he chooses to remain ignorant of what he has experi-
enced, and draws strength from his hysterical faith in the Party.

Gifted pupils of Stalin, Hitler, and the Inquisition, the Inner Party of

Oceania have superseded them all by applying their principles but on
a larger scale. The deeper the Ignorance - the abnegation of reason and

common sense that the Party demands - the stronger the faith this
abnegation generates in the true believer. Ultimately, beyond the prac-
tical, political reasons for enslaving the population, this is the most
important reason for the Party's insistence on the "imposture" of war
and its fabrication of show-trials based on false charges and false con-
fessions that will be received by the masses' hysterical condemnation
of "criminals." Orwell's consistent analogy of the Adversary's faith in

the Party and the medieval true believer's faith in the Church, including
the institution of the Inquisition, has a significant satirical function.
The memorable image of Oceania as a demonic world brought to life
by a fervent "secular religion" is predicated on this analogy.

33

To decode the satirist's target, we should recognize that Goldstein's

Book holds up the mirror to Orwell's contemporaries, demonstrating
the potentially disastrous results of their self-deception. The central

purpose of his satire, as Orwell explains it, was "to indicate, by
parodying them, the intellectual implications of totalitarianism,"

34

a

pathology no longer explicable by Marx's "direct economic explana-
tion" of political behaviour because "the world is suffering from some
kind of a mental disease which must be diagnosed before it can be
cured."

35

Accepting and practising the mental disease of Doublethink

in 1948 could, by 1984, lead to the triumph of the diseased totalitarian
mentality all over the world. However, when warning his Adversary
against making the wrong choice by condoning and trying to emulate
Stalin's dystopic society as if it were a socialist regime, Orwell implies

that there is a right choice available as well, that of creating a society
that provides "economic security without concentration camps" - that
is, the choice to return to the original Utopian aspiration and "to make
democratic Socialism work."

36

CHAPTER FOUR

Dictatorship without a Mask:

Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451,

Vonnegut's Player Piano, and

Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1951), Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano

(1952), and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) are
dystopias different from We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-

four on several counts. They are not dealing with a world-wide dys-
topia but narrow their scope to the United States. The three dystopic

societies described in them borrow liberally from the methods of
totalitarian regimes, mostly from fascism, but they no longer offer a
quasi-Messianistic ideology to cover up for the organized injustice of
those in power.

R A Y B R A D B U R Y : FAHRENHEIT 4 5 I

In Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 the terms of injustice are dictated by a
government that rules through firemen who do not put out fires but

burn books, set houses on fire, and, like Zamiatin's "guardians" or
Orwell's Thought Police, spy upon people and urge them to report on
subversive elements. The story takes place in the United States some
time in the future. In order to have a stable society, the government

uses the anti-intellectual argument that reading is conducive to critical
thinking, and thinking creates unrest and disorder - in other words,
psychological and social instability.

Bradbury's plot-line is strongly reminiscent of Orwell's in Nineteen

Eighty-four: fireman Guy Montag, a man in a privileged position, is
suddenly awakened, by the love of a young woman, to dissatisfaction
with his life in the oppressive system. It is the young woman's contrast

to Montag's wife, Mildred, a complacent product of the system who
spends her days watching the three wall-size television screens in her
living room, that makes Montag awaken to a light buried within him.
The young girl's name is Clarisse, and appropriately she clarifies

Dictatorship without a Mask

89

Montag's subconscious thoughts for him: "How like a mirror, too, her
face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted
your own light to you?" (10).

Awakened to a sense of his unhappiness and the oppressive nature

of the political system, Guy Montag gradually also finds himself in
conflict with the firemen's perceptions of justice. In the course of his

work he is in a position to hide away some books; he starts to read
them with increasing fascination, and for this offence he eventually
faces the gravest punishment. Even if he is not expected formally to
stand public trial, his trial is nevertheless extremely important for the
structure of the book: he is "tried" in a series of seemingly casual
interrogations by the Firechief, Captain Beatty, who also happens to
open for him the traditional "window on history" by explaining how
the firemen came to power as a result of the decline of book-learning,
the public acceptance of censorship, and the seductive power of the
media in the United States of the early 1950s.

After his "trial in installments," Montag is not even told that he has

been found guilty and condemned. Beatty simply orders his subordi-
nate to join him on the fire truck on its way to the daily task of setting
a subversive's house on fire. It is only when they arrive that Montag

recognizes whose house he is expected to burn down: "Why," said
Montag slowly, "we've stopped in front of my house" (99).

Without laying charges or providing evidence, Beatty lets the trial

take its final stage: the meting out of justice. As a fireman Montag is
to carry out his own sentence, just as he has been carrying out the
sentence on others who have been found guilty. At this point, however,
Montag takes justice into his own hands: instead of setting his house
on fire, he turns the flame-thrower against Firechief Beatty, kills him,
and then runs for his life. Unlike the protagonists in We, Brave New

World, and Nineteen Eighty-four, Montag gets away with his rebellion

against the system; he escapes and takes shelter among the Book
People, a subversive group whose members have memorized entire
books to save the heritage of humanity.

Like Zamiatin's, Huxley's, and Orwell's dystopias, Fahrenheit 451 is
a society that denies its past; it has no records of past events, no books,
no documents, and as a result, no framework for personal memory.
However, unlike Huxley and Orwell, Bradbury does not represent the
burning of books and the persecution of writers and readers as an
effect of political dictatorship; rather, he creates a society that became
a dictatorship as a result of burning books and discarding the classics
of our civilization, all records of the past, indeed anything conducive

to the development of personal memory and the working of the

9°

Dystopia West

imagination. No doubt, Bradbury borrows elements from Hitler's and
Stalin's dictatorships. For example, it is Montag's wife who denounces
him to Firechief Beatty; according to the laws established by both
Hitler's and Stalin's dictatorships, a citizen's loyalty to the government

should take precedence over loyalty to a spouse. Signs of dictatorial
terror and violence are clearly discernible: subversives suspected of
being critical of the system are quietly eliminated; children are taught
to be obedient to the state but are encouraged to commit violence and
risk their own lives and those of others by reckless driving and fighting.

Bradbury's point is that this behaviour is natural in a society where
people are bored and dislocated by the mental poverty that follows
from lack of reading. Most significantly, and Bradbury suggests this to

be the source of all its evils, this society burns books, just as Hitler
did. Often what begins as the burning of a few books and the house
where these have been found turns into a real auto-da-fe, a religious
ritual of human sacrifice, as in the case of the old woman who decides
to remain in her house and die with her books. She dies like a martyr,
reciting the parting words of Hugh Latimer, burnt at the stake and

martyred for his faith in 1555.

The old woman's trial and execution has a profound effect on

Montag, completing the process begun by his meeting with Clarisse,
the wish for radical change in himself and in society. While the
Mechanical Hound, a deadly machine capable of detecting books and
readers, is already sniffing at the Montags' door, Guy Montag is trying
to explain his transformation to his wife: "That woman the other night

... You didn't see her face. And Clarisse. You never talked to her ...

But I kept putting her alongside the firemen in the House last night,
and I suddenly realized I didn't like them at all, and I didn't like myself
at all any more" (61).

The burning of books is not just the central but the only phenom-

enon Bradbury is interested in when describing how the entire political
process of the United States could be moving towards a police state. In
his 1966 introduction, written fifteen years after the novel, Bradbury states
that he feared that the McCarthy era, with its anti-intellectualism,
censorship, and its encouragement of citizens' denunciations of one

another, could introduce in the United States a society very much like
Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. In commenting on the movie
version that Francois Truffaut made of the novel, Bradbury sheds
further light on the love of books as his central theme, and maybe

also on the rather two-dimensional characterization that is more
appropriate to an allegory than to a novel aiming for psychological
verisimilitude. He congratulates Truffaut for capturing "the soul and
the essence of the book," which is "the love story of, not a man and

Dictatorship without a Mask 91

a woman, but a man and a library, a man and a book. An incredible
love story indeed in this day when libraries, once more, are burning
across the world."

1

By the end of the novel the burning of books can be recognized as

the prefiguration of the approaching Apocalypse, the final war that
may destroy our civilization. What Bradbury focuses on is one partic-
ular aspect of a police state, namely the repression of free speech, free

thought, free press, the freedom of the imagination. He also draws
attention to the power of the media not only to lie but also to fake
events as a means of state propaganda. When Montag escapes without
a trace, the crew of the television newscast improvises a scene where
a man, chosen at random and photographed from a distance, is shot
on the spot in order to convince viewers that "justice" has been served;

the subversive has been instantly eliminated.

Ultimately Bradbury regards the suppression of truth as virtually the

only, the core crime of totalitarian dictatorships, from which all other
crimes follow. He tells us that "when Hitler burned a book, I felt it
as keenly, please forgive me, as killing a human, for in the long sum
of history, they are one and the same flesh. "

z

And he completes the

thought: "Mind or body, put to the oven, is a sinful practice, and I
carried this with me as I passed countless firehouses."

3

The narrower scope of his criticism notwithstanding, Bradbury fol-

lows the traditional strategies of dystopian satire, which asks the reader
to examine the social pathologies of the present that could lead to the
nightmare world in the future. In fact, Bradbury makes a concentrated

effort to open for Montag "a window on history" that will clarify for
the reader the satirist's targets by having both Firechief Beatty and
Faber describe the past, the fifties - the time when the novel was
written. Faber, a former English professor and a friend of Montag,

points at the past, regretting that in the 1950s the humanities started
to atrophy, began slowly to be destroyed in the name of the machine
civilization. Students at universities abandoned courses in literature;
Readers' Digest reduced classics to a quick, superficial one-page read;
and it became such a sensitive political issue to write about minorities
or various ethnic groups that publishers gave up on publishing litera-

ture, and cheap works on sex and violence pushed out the classics to
please the masses. Faber calls this process "the tyranny of the major-
ity," a false egalitarianism that reduces everyone to the lowest common
denominator, making Americans willing to give up what Matthew

Arnold would have called the best and most beautiful voices of human-
ity in the name of efficiency and saving time. Bradbury suggests that
the American public of the fifties is responsible for the new regime.
"Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped

Dystopia West

reading of its own accord" (78). The political change, then, was not
violent; it was simply the aftermath of cultural decline: "And then the

Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading
only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the
situation with your fireeaters" (79).

While Faber's description of the sins of the fifties becomes a lament

over the decline of book-learning, Montag's boss, Firechief Beatty,
describes the same process as the rise of the media, and with it, the
triumphant rise of the police state. A representative of dictatorial
power, Beatty celebrates the firemen's reign, although he fails to explain

how and why the firemen came to power and what motivates them to
stay in power. In most general terms, of course, the Firechief repro-
duces the Grand Inquisitor's explanation of the happiness and stability
the masses would enjoy at the price of accepting limitations on their

freedom. Instead of turning directly on the heretic, the Grand Inquis-
itor here admits his anti-intellectualism: "the word 'intellectual,' of
course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread
the unfamiliar" (53).

What for the Grand Inquisitor was the happiness of the masses is

for Beatty the economic well-being of the market. But the conclusion
is the same: the masses should be protected from the burden of thinking

for themselves: "the bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle
controversy ... Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.
They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca ... No
wonder books stopped selling ... comic books ... three-dimensional sex

magazines ... It didn't come from the Government down. There was
no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology,
mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God!
Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time" (53-4).

Beatty's speech recalls the self-justification of the Grand Inquisitor,

who is convinced that by subverting the original spirit of Christ he
can make the people "happy." However, Beatty's agenda does not

explain exactly what that original spirit was that became subverted by
the "Happiness boys" who forbade reading. Is it the original spirit of
democracy? Then why did this spirit weaken in the fifties? "If you

don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a
question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let
him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient,
top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry

over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contest ... cram them full of
noncombustible data. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a
sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts

of that sort don't change" (55).

Dictatorship without a Mask

93

Justifying the power of the firemen, Captain Beatty is like the high

priest of the state religion, the only person who still knows the
forbidden lore of the past. He is able to quote from the books he has
burnt in his long years of service, and there is also an indication that,
by giving up his love for reading in order to serve the anti-intellectual
government, he made a sacrifice, just like Zamiatin's Benefactor or

Huxley's Controller. Yet Beatty cannot fully justify this sacrifice to
himself and is consequently an unhappy man. Montag recognizes this
suddenly when he is already on the run and recalls the circumstances of
his trial and punishment. He cries out, "Beatty wanted to die!" He must
have been tired of life when he exposed himself to the flame-thrower
in Montag's hands.

Beatty is an ambiguous character: in the course of Montag's gradual

conversion to book-reading, Beatty gives several signs that he is fully
aware of Montag's thoughts and feelings, including his fear of the
Mechanical Hound. Beatty's personal visit to Montag's house when
the latter stays home from work is also an ambiguous episode: it
combines the possibilities that Beatty has come to spy on his subordi-
nate, to carry on a pre-trial investigation, or to offer a friendly warning
in his parting words to Montag: "Be well and stay well" (68). Still,

Beatty's consistent analysis of the world of the 1950s that led to the
world of Fahrenheit 451 indicates that as Ideal Readers we should be
careful about censorship, the atrophy of book-reading, and the media's
unchecked rise to power if we wish to stop a decline that may lead to
a destructive total war in which "our civilization is flinging itself to
pieces" (78).

Unlike Zamiatin's D-503 or Orwell's Winston Smith, Guy Montag

manages to kill the "high priest" or Grand Inquisitor of the system
and escape. Behind him the city is being destroyed by the war, but Guy
Montag finds a chance for survival in the country among a group of
bibliophiles who memorize entire books to make sure their words will
not be forgotten. It is from these words, Bradbury suggests, that our

civilization may be reborn, like the phoenix who "everytime he burnt
himself up ... sprang out of the ashes ... born all over again" (146).

Although Jack Zipes has reason to say that "throughout the novel,

war lurks in the background until it finally erupts," there is little
evidence that "the obvious reference here is to the Cold War and the
Korean War which might lead to such an atomic explosion as that
which occurs at the end of the book."

4

In fact, when Beatty opens the

"window on history" for Montag, describing to him the problems in

the fifties that precipitated the reign of the book-burning firemen, he
does not refer to any specific war. The story suggests that when "our
civilization is flinging itself to pieces" (78) and when it is "born all

94

Dystopia West

Dictatorship without a Mask

95

over again" as a phoenix, both the destruction and the rebirth of the
world are connected exclusively with the elimination or the survival
of books. The reader may well find that the equation of the decline of
book-reading with the increased chances of the world's destruction by
nuclear war is not sufficiently convincing. The novel reads more like

a parable about the importance of book-learning and of assuring the
survival of our cultural heritage than a convincing political analysis of
a society on its way to the dystopia of dictatorship and destruction.

One of Bradbury's critics objects to the naivete of Bradbury's polit-

ical analysis, claiming that "Bradbury does not locate the source of
destruction in the state, class society, or technology, but in humankind
himself."

5

In itself, I do not believe that drawing attention to the

complicity of the masses in allowing the emergence of the dictator is
a sign of political naivete. If we recall Frigyes Karinthy's "Barabbas,"
or Hannah Arendt's political analysis of this phenomenon, the question
of why the people would opt for the dictator is a question well worth
asking. The problem in Bradbury's analysis of dictatorship is rather
that we do not see the clear connection between the people's desire for

"happiness" and the ways the government seduces them to follow its

own agenda. Except for trying to stay in power, the government in
this dystopic society has no agenda, no program, not even a program
to fabricate its own self-justification.

In concentrating on book-burning, Bradbury chooses one element

he finds most frightening in totalitarian systems and works on that
theme, as it were in isolation, to show how the United States could

also turn into a dictatorship like societies in Eastern and Central
Europe. As a political critique of a society on its way to totalitarianism
the book is not quite convincing. But Fahrenheit 451 is probably less
a full-fledged political dystopia than the diagnosis of a new cultural
phenomenon that Marshall McLuhan explored in The Gutenberg

Galaxy (1962), foreshadowed by The Mechanical Bride (1951). With

open fascination McLuhan follows the passing away of a civilization
based on the printed word, on reading and writing. Reading McLuhan,
it seems that the old world is stepping aside and saluting the rise to
power of a new world created by the electronic media, in the character
of a rather absent-minded new dictator not yet entirely set on either

a benign or a malignant course. Yet it is a dictator when it dictates
new terms to our perceptions, modes of thinking, political discourse,
until "the medium [becomes our] message." Unlike McLuhan, Bradbury
responds to this phenomenon by expressing the moral apprehension
of the humanist. Not quite a convincing dystopian critique of the
dangers of a totalitarian political system or a police state, the novel is
a memorable and passionate outcry against the cultural losses implied

by the passing away of book culture in the media-controlled consumer
society of the 1950s.

KURT VONNEGUT: PLAYER PIANO

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1954) is a technological dystopia, signif-
icantly indebted to Huxley's Brave New World for its subject-matter
and to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four for its structure, although it does
not aspire to match either the scope or the philosophical breadth of
these two novels. In contrast to the settings of the other dystopian novels
discussed so far, the atmosphere of Player Piano does not strike one as
nightmarish. The reader is not hit by cognitive estrangement;

6

Ilium

seems to be a society with which we are familiar, within the range of
our normal, everyday experience. The more immediate, therefore, Von-
negut's warning becomes about a particular kind of technological devel-
opment in North America that may drastically undermine the rights of
the majority and wreak havoc with the democratic system of justice.

Written in 19 52, Player Piano focuses on the effects of a Second

Industrial Revolution in the United States, instigated by a new stage in
the computer-driven robotization of production, whereby the vast
majority, including skilled workers, technicians, and professionals lose
their right to work, although not their right to prosperity. Permanently
unemployed, this vast majority are still granted their own washing
machines, television sets, and glass and steel houses in Homestead, a
new version of the Wellsian Utopia as a combination of a high-tech
slum and the welfare state. To give the people an illusion of being
useful, the elite presses them into lengthy service in a weaponless army
and into an equally useless industrial army, the Reeks and Recks
engaged in make-work road repairs. This social transformation, which
is tantamount to making the population feel superfluous, is sanctioned
by a state religion based on machine worship, ministered to by a very
small elite of technocrats and managers under the aegis of the "national
holy trinity, Efficiency, Economy, and Quality" (261). Vonnegut's trin-
ity recalls Huxley's slogans of the World State, "Community, Identity,
and Stability," which were in turn to draw attention to the political
degradation of the World State that had come to power in the name
of "Fraternity, Liberty, and Equality," the original inspiration for
democracy and democratic socialism.

Vonnegut's protagonist, Paul Proteus, perceives that just as medieval

government was based on the divine right of kings, the American ruling
class claims its legitimacy according to the "divine right of machines"

(2.60). This ruling class of managers and engineers celebrates "the

annual passion plays at the Meadows" (268), where people act out,

<)d D y s t o p i a West

with machinelike precision, the ritual competition of who will best
serve the big Corporation, which represents the essence of the Amer-
ican state machine. The novel is set in Ilium, in the indefinite yet not
too distant future in the United States after a Third World War, fought
with nuclear weapons, in which Americans came to "owe their lives

to superior machines, techniques, organization, and managers and
engineers" (2.61). It is the Americans' technological advantage over
other countries that allowed them to win the war and create great
prosperity for the masses, at the same time transferring all political
power to the ruling elite.

Like Orwell, Vonnegut is less interested in the devastations of such

a future war than in the long-term threat it might pose to political
institutions based on democratic freedom. The machine that was orig-
inally expected to redeem humanity from the suffering of poverty and
back-breaking labour paradoxically turns into an ominous weapon
against human dignity: "During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over
America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their
men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the
war - production with almost no manpower" (1). The unforeseen
result of the advanced technology in this Second Industrial Revolution

makes not only muscle work and routine mental work but also human
thinking dispensable: the big master computer, called

EPICAC,

has

come to "devaluate human thinking" (13) itself.

In these two American dystopias of Bradbury and Vonnegut, the

object of worship is not a half-deified dictator but a quasi-superhuman
machine: in Fahrenheit 451 it is the Mechanical Hound, which can
sniff out books and subversives; in Player Piano it is

EPICAC,

the master

computer, which has changed society and the workings of the human
mind to such an extent that it now gives commands to the whole
population, even to those few who believe they are privileged to give

it their own commands.

Paul Proteus, a brilliant thirty-five-year-old technocrat-manager run-

ning Ilium Works, has all the advantages of belonging to this very
small and very privileged ruling elite, both for his own merits and

because his father was the head of the National Industrial Planning
Board, one of the founding fathers of the new regime. Consequently,
Paul can look forward to further promotion to the even more presti-
gious Pittsburgh Works. However, like Winston, D-503, and Guy
Montag, Paul also grows dissatisfied with his position in society as he
becomes aware that his privileged status is based on injustice.

He understands that it was the miraculous formula of "technology

without people" that won the war, yet he believes that once the war
is over, to replace men "without regard for the effects on life patterns

Dictatorship without a Mask

97

is lawlessness." The narrative formula familiar from We and Nineteen
Eighty-four reveals Proteus growing more and more alienated from his

wife, Anita, who represents the code of values of this society, including
its ruthless ambition to get ahead, to conform, and to flatter those
above. Through his friend, the subversive Ed Finnerty, Paul Proteus
gradually becomes aware of the loss of dignity suffered by the masses.
He considers joining the rebellious Ghostshirt Society, which, like the
Luddites in the First Industrial Revolution, wants to break the machine
and is "prepared to use force to end the lawlessness" (2.61).

Undoubtedly, Proteus's heart is in the right place because he recog-

nizes the injustice implied in the elite's reversal of the age-old Utopian
dream that the masses had a right to expect to see fulfilled after the war.
He sees that "Man has survived the Armageddon in order to enter the
Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked
forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing,
has been condemned as unfit for human consumption" (260).

His sympathy for the underdog turns him against his paternal

benefactor, Dr Kroner, one of the leaders of the corporate world in the

country, as well as against his own wife, Anita. After his first visit to
Homestead with his friend Finnerty, Paul senses that he is going
through a transformation - just like Zamiatin's D-503, who diagnoses
his own "sickness" of developing a soul: "Along with [Paul's] feeling
of dizziness was a feeling of newness - the feeling of fresh, strong
identity growing within him. It was a generalized love - particularly
for the little people, the common people, God bless them ... This was
real, this side of the river, and Paul loved these common people, and

wanted to help, and let them know they were loved and understood,
and he wanted them to love him too" (88).

Vonnegut's tone in this passage introduces his own ambivalence

towards a revolution coming from above. Although Paul Proteus is
full of sympathy and good will, his attitude is a combination of
sentimentality and condescension "for the little people, the common

people, God bless them." He has no clear notion how to help them;
neither does he know how far he is willing to go against his own class.
All he knows is that he would be willing to sacrifice himself for them:

"If his attempt to become the new Messiah had become successful, if

the inhabitants of the north and south banks had met in the middle
of the bridge with Paul between them, he wouldn't have the slightest
idea what to do next" (99).

It is only when Paul finds himself more and more alienated from his

own circle that he makes a more definite attempt to join the rebels,
by now including several subversives from his own class. These sub-
versives are indeed looking for a "Messiah with a good, solid, startling

98 Dystopia West

message" (252) and would like Paul to become their leader, but when
Paul realizes that they would like to "give America back to the people"

by wrecking all the automatic factories, he turns down the offer. He
also finds that the rebels are just as ruthless and ruthlessly "business-
like" as Anita, Kroner, and the other successful members of the ruling
class. When the rebels decide they could use a man from the ruling
class with Paul's pedigree as their leader, Ed Finnerty, Paul's best friend,

is ready to blackmail or even kill Paul if he refuses. Of a Protean nature
and disposition, Paul Proteus is once more caught in the middle: "The
managers and engineers still believed he was their man; the Ghost Shirt

Society was just as convinced that he belonged to them, and both
demonstrated that there was no middle ground for him" (2.65).

While still in a state of indecision, Proteus is approached by Kroner

and Anita, who offer him a chance to regain and enhance his privileged
position by denouncing Finnerty, who is known to be one of the leaders
of the underground Ghostshirt Society. Proteus refuses to inform on

him, not on ideological nor on political, not even on moral grounds,
but simply because "Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no
matter when, no matter what" (269). To taunt Kroner and Anita

further, he declares that he himself is the leader of the Ghostshirts; he
is put on trial as a subversive, a traitor to his own class.

As in the other dystopian novels, the scene at the trial marks the

climactic point in the narrative and in the symbolic action. Paul stands
up here for the rights of the people, the whole of humanity, announcing
that "the main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human

beings ... and not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions or
systems" (73). Still, his specific goal remains undefined: he knows what
he objects to in a society based on the worship of machines, but he has
no political agenda to tell him how far to go with their destruction.
When asked, he vaguely says that "some of the machines" should be

destroyed but details "would have to be worked out" (270).

Here the author also reveals a further irony: although it is Paul's

ambition to become the "Messiah" of the people of Illium - and of
humanity - his opposition to the system is also driven by a personal
grudge emanating from a well-known neurosis (he is here not unlike
John Savage in Brave New World). When at the trial Paul is forced to
take a lie detector test, the audience comes to realize that his revolu-

tionary ideas may be genuine and heartfelt, but he is also driven by
an Oedipal rebellion against his deceased father, who represented to
him all that he disliked in society. At this embarrassing point of his

own "confession," the trial is interrupted by the outbreak of the
Ghostshirt revolution; Paul is called upon to become one of its leaders,
together with the violent Lasher and the ruthless Finnerty.

Dictatorship without a Mask 99

After a period of a violent and large-scale destruction, the rebels are

threatened by a blockade unless they give up their leaders: the leaders
decide to give themselves up. Vonnegut reveals further ambiguities in
the situation: none of the leaders has a positive goal; although they

hate the system based on machine worship, they have no new ideas
about resolving the social injustice created by the computer revolution.

As Paul also realizes, the leaders of the machine breakers are them-
selves enamored with beautifully made machines: "a good part of their
lives and skills had gone into making what they helped to destroy in
a few hours" (287). Even those workers and technicians who have
been forced to yield up their jobs to the machine cannot help worship-

ping the machine's ability to replace human beings: it is a mentality
that is typical of the whole country. Their complaint "wasn't that it
was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that

machines didn't do nearly as many human things as good designers
could have made them do" (218). Even while preparing to break the
machines, one of the rebel commanders is engaged in designing yet

another beautiful machine, "an armored car to which he was adding
antennae, a radar dome, spikes, flails, and other instruments of terrible
slaughter" (255).

To the end the leaders of the revolution remain unsure about the

extent to which they would like to destroy the machine civilization;
neither do they know what should be put in its place after the
destruction. Consequently, when they attempt to restrain the angry

mob on a rampage to destroy the Ilium Works, they are indecisive and
end up being beaten up by their own people. Vonnegut makes it clear
that such a revolution had to be defeated, and Proteus is not really
surprised that the system of managers and technocrats will be restored

and the damaged state machine rebuilt. At the end of the novel he is
left undecided, with a drink in his hand: "'To a better world,' he started

to say, but cut the toast short, thinking of the people of Illium, already
eager to recreate the same nightmare" (295).

Vonnegut leaves us with a sense of ambivalence: was it worthwhile

to stage the revolution? What else could have been done? There is no
doubt that the world of the machine is inhuman, as also suggested by
Zamiatin and Huxley. In an amusing episode Vonnegut makes it clear

that this society no longer exists for the benefit of human beings; they
have become superfluous, fully dispensable. There is a Shah visiting

the United States who is examining advanced American technology
with an eye to introducing some of its benefits to his own country.

The American elite is eager and willing to send experts to his backward
country "to test and classify his people, arrange credit, set up the
machinery." However, having seen the inhumanity implied by the

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Dystopia West

Dictatorship without a Mask

I O I

"machinery" of the American state apparatus, the Shah rejects the

whole offer by asking a very simple question: "Before we take the first

step, would you ask

EPICAC

what people are for?" (277) Also, seeing

that the majority of the citizens of this prosperous country are in effect

fully enslaved by the machine, the Shah keeps referring to them as

"Takaru," which means slaves in his own language, and he will not
be corrected.

There is no doubt, then, that the dilemma created by the worship

of the machine and by the superior capacity of the thinking machine
is not being resolved. Paul Proteus expresses the Protean position of
unresolvable ambivalence about the future. According to Howard

Segal, "Player Piano treats technology and human nature similarly.
Much of the ambivalence toward mankind's future at the conclusion
of the novel stems exactly from Vonnegut's view of human nature as
permanently, inherently flawed."

7

Just as important, I believe, like

Huxley before him, Vonnegut sees the paradox of technological
advance and warns against its potentially dehumanizing effect. Unlike
Huxley, however, he is satisfied to diagnose the problem without

feeling compelled to find a cure at the political level.

According to Hillegas, Player Piano offers the same nightmare vision

as other technological dystopias, but it "seems closer to coming reality
as we may come to know it."

8

From our vantage-point in the twenty-

first century, this novel, written in 19 5 z, is indeed remarkable for its
vision of the tremendous changes introduced by the computer, in effect

a Second Industrial Revolution, capable of causing the same kind of
dislocation and upheaval as the first.

Probably just as importantly, this novel, like Fahrenheit 451, also
reveals many of the sexual attitudes and biases typical of the 1950s.
It is interesting, for example, to see the relatively insignificant role that
women play in these two American dystopias from the early fifties. It

is true that Clarisse signals Montag's awakening to a new self, and he
has to tear himself away from his wife, Mildred, who represents the
code of the dystopian society. However, Guy Montag's relationship to

both women is almost entirely asexual and impersonal: playing a much
smaller role than women in Huxley's or Orwell's novels, both Clarisse
and Mildred remain two-dimensional abstractions.

As for the women in Player Piano, Paul Proteus's wife Anita is a

parody of the ambitious corporate wife who dedicates herself whole-
heartedly to her husband's career. She is less of a character than a cruel
caricature, the incarnation of conformism and social climbing in soci-
ety, with no individual features - an abstract emblem of the evil ways

of the ruling class, without any personal touches. Her obsessive interest

in her husband's career and her determination to keep him under her
influence are presented with harsh contempt by the writer, who paints
her as a mercenary, a cold and calculating woman using her feminine
wiles - that is, her sexual powers - as the only means to get what she
wants from a man in a man's world. Describing the way she rehearses

with her husband for his important business appointments, Vonnegut
uses the strategies of fairly crude satire, with hints at some latent
misogyny in Paul's - or, perhaps, Vonnegut's - perception: "This was
the game she never tired of - one that took every bit of Paul's patience
to play. She was forever casting herself as a person of influence and
making Paul play dialogues with her. There would then be a critique,
in which his responses were analyzed, edited, and polished by her ...
how primitive a notion she had of men's affairs and of how business
was done" (68; my italics).

It is, therefore, entirely predictable that the moment Paul is no longer

a worthy investment, Anita turns away from him coldly. (Of course,
Mildred also turns away from Montag, but she lives in fear of the
regime; in effect it is Mildred who denounces Montag to the Firechief.)

The other woman character in Player Piano is Dr Kroner's wife, who

is called "Mom" by all who know her, a rather sinister caricature of
the American mother as domineering, hypocritical, enforcer of the worst
attributes of a conformist, mindless, competitive society - as if she had
stepped out of the pages of Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers to illus-
trate the phenomenon Wylie christened "momism." Significantly, the
only women presented with a measure of sympathy are the two young
prostitutes Paul meets at his first drinking excursion in Homestead.

9

It is probably also worth noting that, although Vonnegut's novel

follows the dystopian formula, beginning with the protagonist's awak-
ening, followed by alienation, resistance, trial, and punishment, in
Player Piano this traditional structure receives a slight variation: Paul
Proteus's awakening is not introduced by an inspiring woman character
but by his experience of male bonding with his friend, Ed Finnerty.

By contrast with the two American dystopias of Fahrenheit 451 and

Player Piano, women characters play a far more significant and posi-
tive role in We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four, even if
their characterizations do not go much beyond psychological arche-
types. In We Zamiatin presents both O-9O and I-330 with a certain
degree of sympathy. In his relationship with O-9O the protagonist
follows the "rational" sexual attitude prescribed by the One State.

Abandoning placid O-9O for the audacious I-330, the protagonist
becomes both sexually and politically subversive. However, in Zamiatin's
presentation, O-9O is not altogether a conformist either: she is deter-
mined to have the protagonist's child, even if she does not qualify

I O 2

Dystopia West

Dictatorship without a Mask

for the "maternity norm" established with mathematical rigidity by
the regime. O 9 0 knows that by getting pregnant without the state's
permission she may face execution by the Benefactor's Machine; nev-
ertheless, she risks her life to have a child from the man she loves. The
course of the protagonist's political and spiritual development against
the social machine is inextricably interlinked with his psychological

relationship to these two women; he is deeply attached to both.

Also, somewhat against the straight polarization of women charac-

ters familiar from the dystopian cast, Zamiatin has I-330 be of assis-
tance to her rival: she helps O-9O, pregnant with the protagonist's
child, to escape to the world behind the green wall. Although the two
women are temperamentally opposites, in their own way they share in
the protagonist's rebellion against the state machine.

As for Lenina in Brave New World, at first glance she fully represents

the code of sexual behaviour and the mindlessness of the orthodox

Beta she was "hatched" and conditioned to be in London 651 AF. Both
Bernard Marx and John Savage find her physically enticing, but they
also look at her as the embodiment of the mentality they find most
oppressive in this dystopic society. Nevertheless, even though intellec-
tually she is a perfect product of her society - precisely because as a

Beta she has no intellect, no mind of her own - Huxley also reveals
her significant emotional and sexual rebellion against her world's
inhumanity. She has a tendency to form relationships that last longer
than those prescribed and are less casual than they should be in a state
where "everyone belongs to everyone else." When she falls passion-

ately in love with John Savage, emotionally she rebels against her entire
conditioning, including years of sleepteaching, which should make her
reject personal, romantic attachments as absurd. In one of the most
memorable scenes Huxley explores the grotesque comedy of errors

between John and Lenina when she appears at his apartment, ready
to take the initiative. Although they learned the language of love from
a different dictionary, the Savage is not the only one with a heroic
notion about romantic love. No doubt the words the Savage borrows
from Shakespeare genuinely confuse and irritate her, yet Lenina also
takes in this instance an unusual risk to express her feelings for the

Savage: the risk of making herself ridiculous or being rejected. At the
end of the novel she reappears, rushing towards the self-flagellating
Savage with open arms, as he is trying to purify himself from the
corruption of society - and from what he sees as his "sinful" desire
for her.

In Nineteen Eighty-four Winston's relationships to Katherine, his

wife, and to Julia, his lover, follow the traditional pattern of dystopian
fiction: he is awakened to his new self by Julia, who also takes the

1 0 3

initiative by handing him a note confessing her love for him. Both risk
their lives; they live in a society that denies sexuality and channels all
feelings into a fanatical love for Big Brother. Sexual activity is strictly
confined to producing children for the Party, and genuine attachment
between man and woman is regarded as a politically subversive act.

Winston's awakening to his sexuality also means his total rejection of
his former wife, Katherine, a political bigot who refers to making love
as "doing one's duty to the Party." Julia has a central role in the course
of Winston's life and in his psychological and political development;
we cannot even begin to understand Winston's greatest fears and stron-
gest desires without recognizing that Julia is the centre of his Golden
Country; it is when the Party forces him to betray Julia that we realize
it has been successful in finally breaking down Winston's personality.

There is no doubt, then, that sexual or romantic love plays a more

significant role in We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four
than in Fahrenheit 451 or Player Piano, although all five of these
novels concentrate on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of a male
protagonist. Yet, whether we look at the first three or the last two of
these five novels, it is clear that they all represent dystopian fiction as
a male-centred genre, dealing with society primarily from a male point
of view. This tradition is radically changed with the appearance of
feminist Utopias and dystopias in the seventies; Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale (1986) is one of the most powerful examples of

this newer development.

MARGARET ATWOOD: THE HANDMAID'S TALE

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale the regressive, primitive
state religon characteristic of dystopian societies no longer wears the
mask of a secular ideology. Unlike Big Brother, the rulers of Gilead
have never held out the dazzling promise of a secular, Utopian future;
their excuse for taking control was to redress the crisis in a failed
industrial society, endangered by its inability to reproduce itself - by
turning back directly to a medieval, even Old Testament theocracy,
based on a fundamentalist reading of the Bible.

The "window on history" we found essential in all the five dystopias

discussed so far is particularly prominent in this novel, because the
central character, Offred, is also the narrator of the story, and she is

trying to deal with her entrapment by a series of juxtapositions
between her deprived, degraded self in Gilead and her former eman-
cipated self in the United States in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the narra-
tive never enlightens us about the nature of the political change that
was responsible for turning the United States of the eighties into the

I O 4

Dystopia West

Gilead of the millennium. Neither does the narrative clarify what is
usually at the heart of the suspense in the dystopian plot: what is it
that the governing elite believes in? How does it justify to itself the
legitimization of blatant injustice, the scapegoating of a terror-stricken
population, with a particular emphasis on the enslavement of women?

How did the takeover start? The intense suspense Atwood creates so

effectively in the novel is probably due to the necessary limitations of
subjectivity and partial information inherent in a first-person-singular
point of view, as Offred is trying to recall the details of her past before

she was forcibly separated from her daughter and husband. In making
Offred recapture memory as the only means to return to truth and a
basis for human dignity, we can detect the influence of Orwell: the act
of memory is an act of resistance against the totalitarian state with its
insistence on changing history, on eradicating the very concept of his-
torical records, because knowledge of history would form the basis for

a fair comparison between the past and the new regime - a comparison
dictatorships cannot afford. This emphasis on the protagonist's pursuit of
the private self, of free expression and criticism, through the pursuit
of individual memory is a fundamental theme in Orwell's, Bradbury's,

and Atwood's dystopias, and it connects with the theme of censorship
and the freedom of public opinion in the dystopias descriptive of political
reality in the Eastern bloc as well.

Like Winston Smith, Offred bewails the fact that private memory

has severe limitations as a public record. Since she is shut into her inner
world - she is not allowed to talk unless talked to, and she has no

access to written records - Offred has to rely entirely on her memory
to conjure up the past, to explain to herself how she got imprisoned,
with the rest of her sex, in Gilead. Her memory of sweeping political
changes is of necessity vague and fragmented. This blurry quality, inci-

dentally, adds to the psychological versimilitude, but also imposes a
limitation on Atwood's political analysis of the new system and its
connection with the old one. A somewhat more detailed answer to some
of the questions about the old system of which the narrator has no full
recollection will be delivered in the epilogue to the novel, the "Histor-

ical Notes on the Handmaid's Tale" (a satirical device that fulfils a
function similar to that of Orwell's epilogue, "The Principles of News-
peak"): "Stillbirths, miscarriages and genetic deformities were wide-
spread and on the increase, and this trend has been linked to the various
nuclear-plant accidents, shutdowns, and incidents of sabotage that

characterized the period, as well as to leak-waste disposal sites ... and
to the uncontrolled use of chemical insecticides, herbicides, and other

sprays" (z86).

Dictatorship without a Mask

1 0 5

Atwood presents the United States of the 1980s as a society in social

and physiological decline, devastated by the

AIDS

epidemic and the

appearance of genetic deformities resulting from the use of certain
birth-control pills. On the excuse of this decline, the new military
government chooses to have the American Constitution suspended and
return society to the grim justice of the distant past of antiquity, the
ancient days of the Bible. Or, to be more precise, the government
chooses the letter but not the spirit of the Bible to cover up for its
own self-serving, power-hungry actions.

As Offred remembers it, the takeover of the theocracy came about

gradually, as a response to the breakdown of consumerist capitalist
democracy, to the infertility caused by the ecological imbalance of
nuclear experiments, fallout, and toxic waste, a crisis responded to or
precipitated by (one does not quite know which) the right-wing fun-
damentalist backlash of a large segment of the population, who
regarded the signs of consumerism and the social changes introduced
by Women's Liberation and the sexual revolution of the 1970s as
excesses to be eliminated, and who were eager to endorse a puritanical,
openly patriarchal and fundamentalist government.

Whether it was a mass movement or an elitist coup that turned the

United States of the 1980s into the theocracy of Gilead, middle-class
professionals like Offred and her husband Luke had their share in
bringing it about. Intimidated by the obvious signs of terror, they
showed little resistance to the process through which women were first
deprived of their right to hold a bank account and then to hold a
job.^I didn't go on any of the marches. Luke said it would be futile
and I had to think about them, my family, him and her. I didn't think
about my family. I started doing more housework, more baking. I tried
not to cry at mealtimes. By this time I started to cry, without warning,
and to sit beside the bedroom window, staring out. I didn't know many
of the neighbours, and when we met, outside on the street, we were
careful to exchange nothing more than the ordinary greetings. Nobody
wanted to be reported for disloyalty" (169).

In this sense, the misogynist legislation of Gilead is simply the end

result of the timid attitude of an entire generation in the 1980s, of the
women themselves who gave their consent by not having the courage
to protest or even to discuss their situation with others. Of course, one
should be careful not to blame the victim of violence too readily. The
ruling elite of Gilead is a military junta able to have objectors or those
suspected of being subversives not only exterminated but also tortured.
Like Iran, Gilead returns to a medieval theocracy in the middle of the
twentieth century, at the same time modelling its advanced methods

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Dystopia West

Dictatorship without a Mask

107

of intimidation on the terror of Hitler's and Stalin's dictatorships. It
borrows a great deal from the one-party system of the

USSR;

it has

periodic purges of leaders supected of liberal tendencies, first with
public, later with secret trials, and it works to create fear and intimi-

date the masses through the ritualized, that is periodically recurring,
secret trials and public execution of "culprits." Thus Gilead demon-
strates that peculiar duality of law and lawlessness we have observed
in totalitarian dictatorships, where the exclusion of an entire class -

here an entire sex - becomes a legally acceptable measure to assure
the cohesion of the system.

In its disenfranchisement of women the elite of Gilead followed the

methods of Hitler in Germany, who managed to isolate, encircle, and
disenfranchise an entire class of scapegoats, former citizens, by depriv-
ing them of their human rights gradually, through a step-by-step

"legal" process. The elite of Gilead do not justify their legitimization

of blatant injustice by racist theories but use a latent gender hatred or
misogyny within the general mechanism of scapegoating. The process
leads to the regression of a modern state with its civilized legal system
based on inalienable human rights to a barbaric state where the entire
female sex is enslaved by the state through law.

Ostensibly, it is to solve the crisis of infertility that the women are

enslaved, their identity, even their names taken away. But on closer
inspection the crisis of infertility is merely an excuse for a government
that has no other interest than to establish the elite's privileged position

in the hierarchy. Even within the enslaved population of women there
are still class differences: the Commanders' wives are of higher standing
than the "Marthas," or domestic servants. The "handmaids," whose
function it is to bear children by the Commanders, become "surrogate
mothers," giving up their child to the Commander's wife - ultimately
to the state authorities. The handmaid unable to conceive is sent to the

colonies to join the millions of "useless" women who are forced to
perform the deadly task of cleaning up nuclear and toxic waste, Gilead's
own version of the "final solution." Clearly, Gilead here borrows its
methods of terror and intimidation from fascism: the entire female pop-

ulation is reduced to life in an enormous system of concentration camps,
with inmates at various levels of degradation. Subversives and infertile
and aging women are forced to live and work in the colonies that are
death camps; every woman is afraid of being sent there and is therefore
more compliant in fulfilling the role assigned to her by the authorities.

The women in the Rachel and Leah Re-education Centre are being

trained and coerced to be fit for their new roles. The "Aunts" who
are in charge of their re-education follow the methods of the ss, but
they are inmates themselves because the most "cost-effective way to

control women for reproductive and other purposes was through
women themselves" (290). Here Gilead follows the ways of colonizers
all over the world who "control the indigenous by members of their

own group." The Aunts are women who originally believed in "tradi-
tional values" or wanted the benefits that go with their position:
"When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting" (290).

As well as living in fear of the extermination or punishment camps,

the women are also isolated from their children, their men, and even
from one another, another reason why they accept their various roles
in a fairly docile manner. Except for the Commanders and their wives,

men and women are segregated, each imprisoned in his or her respec-
tive role, forbidden to talk to each other.

Of course the men, whose position resembles that of the guards, the

state police, and the military, are also deprived and degraded: the

majority of the men are isolated from women, except for the high-
ranking Commanders, who have their wives and a series of concubines,
although these men tend to be middle-aged or aging, and less likely

than young males to engender children.

So in Gilead the original generic "emergency" designed to compen-

sate for the ecological disaster and the resulting infertility is not
handled effectively at all. Which males are and are not entitled to

handmaids is determined by the individual's rank; it becomes a matter
of political power. After a while it becomes clear that whatever excuse
the government had to attain power, by now its sole purpose is to

sustain the dictatorship. This becomes obvious when Offred finds out
that, although the Commanders parade in public as puritanical, patri-
archal upholders of family values, it is tacitly understood that they

have the right to partake of the sexual services of the Jezebels, women
sentenced to work as prostitutes in the state brothels maintained for

the elite's entertainment.

The dictatorship, like the totalitarian dictatorships of Stalin and

Hitler, follows the principles of keeping the entire population in fear
and trembling and of reducing victims to a subhuman state. To this

end victims who spend their lives in fear of the victimizer are on
occasion given the privilege of acting as victimizers. "The architects of
Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system ... you must

offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return
for those you remove" (290). To begin with, the entire population is

repeatedly exposed to the bodies of those executed by the authorities
following an allegedly "secret trial" - in fact, no trial at all: "The three
bodies hang there, even with the white sacks over their heads looking

curiously stretched, like chickens strung up by the neck in a meatshop
window" (260).

i o 8

Dystopia West

But there is an even more effective ritual in which the "criminal" -

in effect, a victim selected at random by the authorities - is torn to
pieces by the handmaids themselves: "Scapegoats have been notori-
ously useful throughout history, and it must have been most gratifying
for these Handmaids, so rigidly controlled at other times, to be able
to tear a man apart with their bare hands every once in a while" (289).
At this ritual, we hear from Offred, she feels "an energy building here,
a murmur, a tremor of readiness and anger. The bodies tense, the eyes
are brighter, as if aiming" (261). It is after witnesssing this ritual that

Offred feels "for the first time, their power" (268).

Offred's fear for her own safety is enhanced by her understanding

that anyone could be singled out at random as a victim, that in fact
the religion practised in the theocracy of Gilead is a religion based on
human sacrifice. Offred looks at the victim: "He says something. It
comes out thick, as if his throat is bruised, his tongue huge in his
mouth, but I hear it anyway. He says: 'I didn't ...'" (262).

Allowing the victims to act as executioners of other victims is prob-

ably the single most important ritual expressing the essential mecha-
nism of dictatorship. One could say that the entire population is
enslaved, but the males still feel more privileged than the females, the
wives and Aunts more than the other females, and the general mass of
female slaves are still given the privilege of looking down on the victim
singled out to be torn apart as less privileged (even if only temporarily).

In spite of the constant reminders of terror, in Gilead just as in

Oceania, people occasionally find the courage to explore means of
resistance or escape through the Mayday Underground movement. Of
course, one's contact from the movement could turn out to be an agent
provocateur. When Offred fails to get pregnant by the Commander,
Selina, the Commander's wife, arranges a clandestine meeting between
Offred and Nick, the young chauffeur, to enhance Offred's chances of
being impregnated and thereby adding to Selina's family prestige. This
has, of course, to be kept secret from the Commander and the author-
ities. But Nick and Offred fall in love and begin to see each other more
frequently, and this further secret has also to be kept from Selina: by
offending against any of the strict sexual rules, the offenders play with
their lives. In addition to this risk, Offred cannot know whether Nick

is truly a member of the resistance or an agent provocateur working
for the state police. Still, when she gets pregnant and Nick sends a van
for her to take her into hiding and then, ostensibly, to arrange her escape
to Canada, she decides to go; neither she nor the reader can tell
whether she is to be taken to freedom or to her death: "The van waits
in the driveway, its double doors stand open. The two men, one on
either side now, take me by the elbows to help me in. Whether this is

Dictatorship without a Mask

1 0 9

my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given
myself into the hands of strangers, because it can't be helped. And so
I step up, into the darkness within: or else into the light" (276-7).

Since these are the last words of the narrative, the novel ends on a

note of ambiguity. This ambiguity is not dissolved in the epilogue
either. In the form of the "Historical Note" Atwood uses the frame-

work of an academic conference held two hundred years after the
demise of Gilead, where learned and pretentious history professors
agree that Offred must have had a chance to transfer her story to tape
while in hiding, before her trip to Canada. They also agree that her
fate after the period of hiding simply cannot be known. We are left,

then, with the fact that Offred took a tremendous risk by entrusting
herself to Nick, who may have been her saviour or her betrayer. For
a chance of winning her freedom, she took the risk of being captured
or tortured if intercepted.

Stillman and Johnson argue that, in contrast to the more heroic stance

of resistance taken by Offred's friend, the spirited and rebellious Moira,
(condemned to the fate of a Jezebel), or to Offred's mother, who was

politically active in the transition period of the 1980s, Offred is com-
placent, in many ways complicit with the political disaster that turned
the United States into Gilead. They state that "in a sense, Offred has
betrayed both her mother and her best friend through her complicity,

her ignoring that is no ignorance. Ultimately, of course, Offred betrayed
herself ... She has given herself 'over into the hands of strangers.'"

10

I believe this is somewhat unfair as a character description. It would

be equally unfair to blame Zamiatin's D-503, Huxley's Savage, or
Orwell's Winston Smith for the failure of their struggle for freedom in

the totalitarian system. In fact, the entire point of dystopian satire is
to emphasize that once we, the Ideal Reader's generation, allow the
establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship, it becomes overwhelming,
and no effort on the part of an individual within that system is capable

of ending it. Our collective failure today dooms the individual in the
future. Since the dystopian regime denies its subjects' free will, the

central character cannot be made responsible for his or her ultimate
failure or defeat in the repressive system that overpowers individuals
by isolating them from one another and by transforming them into
nameless, faceless numbers. It is inherent in the genre as we have seen

it in the six examples so far that, unless we prevent the repressive
system from coming into being by standing up against harmful trends
around us today, we ruin the chances for the protagonist's generation
in the future. (In general, one of the threats implied in the author's

warning is the longevity of the dystopian system: O'Brien warns
Winston that the Inner Party is eternal; in Gilead the words of the

n o

Dystopia West

Bible also conjure up, indirectly, an image connected with Eternity, or
at least longevity.)

Offred cannot be blamed for trying to appear compliant, since the

semblance of compliance is the condition of survival in dictatorship.
Also, she is in the biological bind of the parent who has been forcibly
separated from her child; she is willing to take any risk to her personal

safety so that she can find out about her daughter, hear about her. In
the meantime she can survive in this nightmarish society only by
becoming pregnant once more. She must comply with the system to
assure her life and maintain her hope of seeing her lost child once
more. (In fact Offred is persuaded to escape only after she finds out
from Selina that her daughter is alive in Gilead, but she has no way
ever to make contact with her.)

There is no doubt, as Stillman and Johnson suggest, that Offred's

behaviour in the 1980s should be open to scrutiny. They suggest that

Offred is the American Every woman who could "exemplify what not
to do before Gilead consolidated its power [because] she was compla-
cent about her own status and rights, [and because] her small resis-
tances were ineffective or counterproductive."

11

Once again, however,

I believe it would be unfair to single out Offred for blame more than
we individually blame ourselves for being "ineffective" in stopping
nuclear experiments, being "counterproductive" when trying to stop

fundamentalist hysteria all over the world, or "complacent" about
every possible manifestation of sexism.

In fact, it is at times quite difficult for the Ideal Reader to translate

the manifold warning implied in the narrative if we read it as a political
satire of the American 1980s. It seems clear that the fundamentalists
who came to power must have considered the trends introduced by
feminism, the sexual revolution, and of a hedonistic consumerism

excessive and therefore repellent; the society of Gilead represents a
deliberate reversal of all these trends by taking away women's freedom,
introducing extreme sexual puritanism, and denying people consumer
goods that used to provide comfort and entertainment. Yet it is difficult
to see how and why these trends could have developed in the context

of nuclear accidents, the ecological disaster caused by toxic waste, and
the somewhat mysterious phenomenon of infertility. In this case, one
assumes, the extreme right wing simply used its latent misogyny to
declare women the scapegoats for unsolvable biological and ecological
problems. But there is something haphazard in Offred's political anal-
ysis here that is not truly clarified by the epilogue either; consequently,
the dystopian novel's "message" which usually emerges from our

decoding of the satirical target from the interaction between the two
time-planes, is not entirely clear.

Dictatorship without a Mask in

Booker admits that "Atwood's book is a little vague about the

mechanism by which the theocracy of Gilead actually managed to
supplant the United States government," but he praises the power of
Atwood's dystopian vision, claiming that "the seeds of her dystopia
clearly do exist in the contemporary efforts of the American religious
right to enforce its beliefs through political power."" Here, however,

I believe that we should also notice that the attitude to women in

Gilead is not simply a continuation of the American attitude to women

in the 1980s: it is a reversal, a grotesque backlash to what reactionary
forces must have seen as the extremes of feminism. By the same token,
the extreme sexual puritanism of Gilead, where both male and female
are forced to deny or repress their sexuality, is not a continuation of
the mores introduced by the sexual revolution of the 1970s (following
upon the Freudian revolution several decades earlier) but its reversal.

And here I come to what I see as the general problem of postmodern
readings of The Handmaid's Tale, which pay no attention to the
structural strategies of dystopian satire.

In discussing how the women of Gilead are "stripped of their

original names," Booker calls upon Althusser's argument that "the
interpellation of the subject begins even before birth in the complex
of expectations that the family and society develop concerning the
infant to be."

13

Booker's point here implies a seamless continuity, even

an identity between attitudes to language in the United States of the

1980s and the dystopic Gilead of the future. But if the subversive or

dehumanizing qualities of the practices of Gilead are simply an
unchangeable part of the way language operates in any society at any
time, we overlook the distorting, aggrandizing mirror of dystopian
satire, whose function it is to warn us how to prevent the monstrosity

envisaged in a totalitarian dictatorship of the future from becoming a
reality. If we insist that the horrors of Gilead are already in full force
today in our society, we miss the specific target of the satire as well
as the direction of the writer's warning, which is based on the assump-
tion that a democratic society, in spite of its flaws, is still essentially
different from a totalitarian dictatorship and, most importantly, that
it is therefore still possible to prevent the transformation of democracy
into dictatorship.

On the whole, when we compare Bradbury's, Vonnegut's, and
Atwood's novels, the three North American dystopian satires, and We,
Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four, we find that all six make
an important distinction between the two different time-planes, the

time of the writing of the novel and the vision of a hypothetically
nightmarish future. The society described in each case demonstrates

i i 2 Dystopia West

the legitimization of blatant injustice by a ruling elite, a nightmarish
society with the recurring ritual of trials and cruel punishments as
occasions to demonstrate the power of the state religion. With the
exception of Zamiatin's We, which warns of the further development in
Russia of the tyranny of 1920, all five Western dsytopian classics borrow

elements of foreign totalitarian dictatorships in Eastern and Central
Europe to develop their warnings to their own society in the West.

All six novels show an interaction of elements of satire and tragedy,

with the tragic elements less prominent in the three North American
novels. This is probably because these three works happen to find a
solution to the central character's predicament in a situation where
hope for the future is still a possibility: Guy Montag escapes and finds
shelter among a group of Book People; at the end of a defeated
revolution, Vonnegut's Paul Proteus is disillusioned, somewhat cynical,

but not entirely incapacitated to fight further; and Atwood's Offred is
willing to risk her life to find freedom outside of Gilead.

It is probably also worth noting that the structural principle of the

protagonist's awakening, rebellion, and punishment can be observed
in all six works; however, in Bradbury's, Vonnegut's, and Atwood's
novels the love relationship in the protagonist's awakening seems a
great deal less important psychologically, or, to put this another way,
here the political involvement of the central character does not coincide
with a need for psychological and personal intimacy to the same extent
it does in We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four.

Another point worth noting is that Bradbury, Vonnegut, and

Atwood seem unconcerned with the phenomenon of a Big Brother -
that is, the worship of a mythologized, semi-divine leader. The only
flirtation with superhuman power is shown in the extraordinary power
of a man-made machine: the Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451,

and the master computer,

EPICAC,

in Player Piano. Finally, it might

also be pointed out that Bradbury, Vonnegut, and Atwood do not go
beyond the United States in mapping out the borders of their dystopia,
while We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-four project the
nightmarish future on to a world-wide screen.

In conclusion, not only do these six dystopian novels show common

themes and structures; they also reveal a strong sense of interconnect-
edness - that is, the earlier "classic" examples put their stamp upon
the rest of the genre. Thus, regardless of the different satirical targets
in each novel, both We and Brave New World had an undeniable
influence on Orwell, and all three North American dystopias fall into
the tradition established by Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell.

Part Two

Dystopia East: The Soviet

Union

Andrei Platonov

CHAPTER FIVE

The Writer on Trial:

Socialist Realism and the Exile

of Speculative Fiction

While the Western writers of dystopian fiction have projected their

fears of a monster state into a hypothetical future, warning against
something that could, but should not be allowed, to come to pass,
during the long decades of totalitarian dictatorship the writers of
Eastern and Central Europe offered an indignant, often bitter criticism
of a dystopic society "as is," a fait accompli of historical fact. The
reader is also faced with another striking difference between these two

bodies of literature: unlike the relatively narrow rivulets formed by the
utopian-dystopian genre in the West, in the Soviet Union and the Soviet
bloc the utopian-dystopian discourse swelled to become the main-
stream of literature in the period under discussion.

With the victory of the revolution, Russia (from 1920 the Soviet

Union) became the land of an unprecedented Utopian experiment, and

the entire body of official Soviet literature written during this experi-
ment became "utopian" by necessity, in that it became the writers'
state-assigned duty to reflect, celebrate, and inspire optimism for the
building of the state Utopia. Lenin and Stalin expended a great deal of
energy articulating the "task," the "function," the "duties" to be
assigned to literature because they saw the tremendous political impor-
tance of the literary work in imbuing the dark, violent, hungry world

of the present with the light reflected from the "radiant sun" of
Communism fixed safely at the end of the historical process. This
function of official literature, to sing the praises of the Communist
future by also covering up the flaws of the present, became established
right after the revolution; after all, to a regime that rests its legitimacy
on a fiction about the future, it must seem natural to buttress this
legitimacy with a fiction about the present.

Nevertheless, the codification of this function in "the doctrine of

Socialist Realism was launched out of the blue [only] in 1932. During

n6 The Soviet Union 1920S-1950S

the following years it took shape in several pronouncements at the
highest level (by Zhdanov in his speech to the first Writers' Congress
in 1934, and then again in 1947 in his "report" on the journals Zvezda
and Leningrad) and, more importantly, through the gradual establish-
ment of an illustrative canon which started with Maxim Gorkij's The
Mother (1906)."

J

Of course, one should by no means imagine a climate of freedom

for any work of fiction expressing doubt or criticism about the state
Utopia, whether before or after the 1934 Guidelines. The year 1929
marks Stalin's "fantasectomy" of the literary imagination, the banning
of works on future societies (including science fiction). What both
Hitler's and Stalin's bans on such works indicate is that, when the state
engages the whole of organized society in testing a speculation about
the future, there is no longer room for genuinely speculative literature.
The imagination is itself nationalized, taken under state control. Writ-
ten in 1920, Zamiatin's We, which follows the Western tradition of
speculative futuristic structure, was rejected for publication; but so was
Zazubrin's "The Chip: A Story about a Chip and Her," written in

1923, though it does not follow that structure. Another work of a

dystopian impulse, Victor Serge's critique of the revolution, Conquered

City, was written between 1929 and 1930, smuggled abroad in instal-

ments, and published abroad: Serge knew the work had no chance of
publication in the Soviet Union, where by 1929 "full power in the
literary field was placed in the hands of the Russian Association of
Proletarian Writers which, at the 'Stalinist Revolution' plunged into
the role of executioner with gusto. Many journals and publishing
houses were closed. There was a wave of suicides among writers and
poets. Recantations became an epidemic. "

z

Platonov wrote The Foun-

dation Pit in 1930, but in this atmosphere received nothing but
repeated rejections; he solicited the help of Gorky, who saw merit in
the work but was also convinced that it was unpublishable for both
aesthetic and ideological reasons.

If the official mainstream of literature became Utopian literature, it

followed that those who held back from their state-appointed task to
praise the Party according to the political-aesthetic Guidelines to Social-
ist Realism would become, in our definition, anti-utopian or dystopian
writers. From the point of view of the state Utopia they were simply
subversives, to be censored or banned.

The Guidelines and the establishment of the Writer's Union in 1934

played an important role in codifying both the ideological and the
aesthetic principles of state policy on literature. As for "the Union of
Soviet Writers, [it] has been a paradoxical institution. It was structured
at the outset in such a way as to enable writers to police literature on

The Writer on Trial

1 1 7

behalf of the party."

3

It worked often in co-operation with the KGB,

and ultimately under the close control of the Party's Central Committee
itself. As Boris Groys has pointed out in The Total Art of Stalin, "it
is of course irrelevant to object here that Voroshilov or Kaganovich or
Stalin himself were not experts on literature or art, for they in reality

were creating the only permitted work of art - socialism - and they
were moreover the only critics of their own work."

4

But one should

probably add here another point as well. Stalin needed the sanction
of literature and the arts to offer justification to the ever-changing
policies of the Party line dictated by his interpretation of the realpolitik
of the day, in the name of an ideology based on a fixed image about

the future.

The close interaction between the Party's Central Committe, the KGB,

and the Writer's Union also provided the regime with a consistent
method of singling out and destroying many a loyal and well-established

writer by turning him into a cause celebre in demonstration of the
newest "heresy" the Party decided to introduce to the public. A case in
point would be Vassily Grossman, author of For a Just Cause, who

"enjoyed the full support of the General Secretary of the Writer's Union"

until, in February 1953,

a n e w

series of purges, directed particularly at

Jews, gathered momentum. Suddenly, Grossman's fiction was attacked,

"possibly at the instigation of Stalin himself. During the following

months he was repeatedly and hysterically denounced as a Jewish
nationalist, a reactionary idealist alienated from Soviet society ... and
saved from almost certain arrest not by his own 'letter of repentance'
but by the change in the political climate following Stalin's death in

March 1953."

5

The interaction between the cultural bureaucracy of the Writer's

Union, the Central Committee, and the KGB was still important in the
post-Stalin years. Having completed Life and Fate in i960, Grossman
submitted the manuscript to the journal Znamya: "Even at the height
of Khruschov's 'thaw' the editors wasted no time in handing over the

manuscript to the Cultural Section of the Central Committee ... In
February 1961 two KGB officers came to his home with orders to
confiscate the manuscript ... Grossman died of cancer in 1964, deeply

depressed ... that his masterpiece would [never ] see the light of day.'"

5

Another logical consequence of this comprehensive politicization of

art and literature is that any writer caught deviating from the aesthetic
or philosophical model set by Socialist Realism was pronounced ideo-
logically deviant. Being declared a "formalist," or in Grossman's case

an "idealist," implied that the writer had offended against the canon
of Socialist Realism; the plethora of such "deviants" demonstrates that
"it is impossible to impose a single approach on literature, an act which

n 8

The Soviet Union 1920S-1950S

by its very nature invites dialogue, discussion and disagreement."

7

Yet

it seems that the greater Stalin's intolerance of the very principles of
literature and freedom of expression, the greater also became his need
to hear writers sing his praises. There is a grotesque irony in Stalin's
insistence on having poets, including Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and
Pasternak, compose odes to him during the darkest terror of the
Moscow show-trials in the 1930s - as if he wanted to provide a live
performance in illustration of the fictional trial scene in Zamiatin's We,
where the true poet is executed while the official state poets sing hymns
to the executioner as their "Benefactor."

" H Y M N S T O T H E G O D S A N D P R A I S E S O F

F A M O U S M E N " : P L A T O ' S P H I L O S O P H E R K I N G

A N D T H E S T R A I T J A C K E T O F S O C I A L I S T R E A L I S M

What are the origins of the Guidelines to Socialist Realism? When we

speak of the Guidelines, the government decree introduced at the 1934
meeting of the Soviet Writers' Congress and then restated in Zhdanov's
decree of 1946, we should recall the inextricable connection between the
state's encouragement of the arts and concomitant severe censorship
throughout the history of Utopian thought.

When Plato's Philosopher King expels the tragedian and the lyric

poet from the Republic for encouraging the richness and range of the
emotions, he explains that "poetry feeds and waters the passions
instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to

be controlled." Clearly, the Republic does not declare the poet redun-
dant as long as his work is confined to writing hymns and praises of
the state, thereby demonstrating his function as the gardener of young
souls whose emotions must be pruned and guided in the interest of
the community, to be ruled in every aspect of life by "law and reason."
Preoccupied by the splendours of technology, Stalin no doubt believed
he was paying the supreme compliment to literature by designating
the writer "the engineer of the human soul." The unique power of the
gardener - or the engineer - to mould the new man who will fit the
new model of society is the reason why the Philosopher King acts as
a circumspect censor, legislating on every aspect of literature and
mythology, beginning with Homer, and determining which stories
about gods and goddesses would have to be banned so as not to
interfere with the creation of the model state: "We are ready to
acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy
writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the

gods and praise of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be

admitted into our republic."

8

Does it not seem, then, that in demanding

The Writer on Trial

1 1 9

"hymns" to socialism and odes of "praise" to the Master, Stalin and

Zhdanov took dictation directly from the Philosopher King?

It was precisely Plato's tremendous respect for the artist's creative

power, for the power of language to persuade, mould, evoke, and
inspire, that made the Philosopher King wish to exercise absolute
control over literature and the writer. In reality, in the Republic it is
the Philosopher King who is the Master of all artists, ultimately the
prototype of the only "real" artist. All professional artists employed
by the state are mere replicas, partial mirror-images or shadows of his

creative prerogative, sharing only conditionally in his power to mould
the perfect specimen for the perfect society.

The role of the state and the head of the state are very similar in

this respect in the greatest Utopian experiment of the twentieth century,
with its fiat of human engineering, its "casting" or "building" or

"forging" the "new Socialist man" of tomorrow. In his famous speech

Zhdanov points out the function of literature "to select the best
feelings and qualities of the Soviet person" and "to reveal tomorrow
for him." A title that reflects upon this image is that cornerstone of

the Socialist Realist canon, Ostrovskij's How the Steel Was Tempered

(1935), where the "steel" that is "tempered" is the new man.

9

We see the grotesque failure of this originally Platonic attempt to

build the new man not only in Huxley's parody in Brave New World
but also in Voinovich's Moscow 2042, possibly the strongest dystopian

satire about the Soviet regime, where the scientist-created Communist
Superman - Supey for short - is gradually reduced by the scientist
bureaucrats to a debilitated, deformed, castrated golem.

L E N I N ' S " T H E F U N C T I O N O F A R T " :

LITERATURE ON TRIAL

Moving from Plato to a chronologically closer precursor to the 1934
Guidelines on Socialist Realism, we turn to Lenin's famous 1905
pronouncement on the function of art, claimed to be a key document
in the formation of the Guidelines.

10

In both its tone and its subject-

matter Lenin's essay demonstrates the threefold phenomenon that came
to form the central concern of all anti-utopian or dystopian critiques
of the Soviet experiment.

To begin with, the speaker asserts absolute certainty about the future

to be delivered, along the path delineated by Marx, by the forces of
historical necessity. Second, the speaker asserts an equally absolute
faith in one, and only one, Party that is to lead the "revolution from
above" and maintain power after the revolution. Finally, self-justified
in the scientific veracity of his convictions, the speaker is unashamedly

I2.O

The Soviet Union 1920S-1950S

intolerant of any voice in opposition: Lenin's essay reads like a trial
where literature, or freedom of expression in general, is put in the
dock, and the speaker figures as prosecutor, judge, and defence counsel
in the same person: he simply brooks no opposition, whether engaged
in politics or in literary criticism.

Lenin insists on the leader's responsibility to harness the energy of

the arts - along the same lines he later suggests for the harnessing of
electric energy - by making the artist "part of the common cause of the
proletariat, a 'cog and a screw' of one single great social-Democratic

'mechanism' set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard
of the entire working class. Literature must become a component of
organized, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work.""
Lenin's vocabulary, with its emphasis on utilitarian, mechanical imag-
ery, is revealing, foreshadowing Stalin's much less eloquent but equally
famous toast to the common people at the 1945 victory parade at the
Kremlin: "I would like to drink to the people who are considered
'screws' of the great state mechanism, but without whom we, the
marshals and commanders of fronts and armies, are ... not worth a
darn. Some 'screw' is out of order - and all is finished. I raise a toast
to people who are common, ordinary, modest - for 'screws' that keep
our large state mechanism in a state of readiness in all areas of science,
economics and the military to the common people who are considered
'screws' of the great state mechanism."

11

Unlike Stalin in 1945, in 1905 Lenin still apologizes for the mechan-

ical metaphor and foresees "hysterical intellectuals to raise a howl
about such a comparison, which degrades, deadens, 'bureaucratizes'
the free battle of ideas, freedom of criticism, freedom of literary
creation, etc. etc." In Lenin's view such an objection is "hysterical,"

"nothing more than an expression of bourgeois-intellectual individu-

alism." He does, however, make a conscious effort to search for a more
inspiring organic metaphor when declaring that the writer must "infuse

[into the literary process] the life stream of the living proletarian

cause." In these pre-revolutionary speculations, more than a decade

before coming to power, Lenin still goes back and forth between the
metallic, mechanical imagery of state censorship and the organic image
of a "natural" freedom of expression and creativity. He emphasizes
that the change of all literature into party literature will not come
easily. "Far be it from us to advocate any kind of standardized system
or a solution by means of a few decrees," he interjects, an ironic
statement in the light of the Stalin-Zhdanov decrees of 1934 and 1946,
supposedly a continuation of the Leninist legacy. In the light of Stalin's
ruthless enforcement of these decrees by publicly reprimanding, expel-
ling, deporting, incarcerating, or executing writers suspected of sub-
versive ideas, Lenin's words from 1905 receive a tragic illumination.

The Writer on Trial 121

Yet, in spite of attempting to respond to the objections of an

imagined liberal political opponent (repeatedly put down as an ulti-
mately irresponsible "bourgeois individualist"), already in 1905 Lenin
emphasizes the need for harsh Party control not only over literature
but also over "science, philosophy, or aesthetics." Like a somewhat

irritable schoolteacher who cannot get over the repeated mistakes
made by his lazy or unimaginative pupil, Lenin points out the paradox
in his opponents' clamour for the principle of democratic rights as the
foundation of freedom when he promises that "we want to establish,
and we shall establish, a free press," but he also adds that this free

press "will also be free from [the opponents'] bourgeois-anarchist
individualism" (25).

In other words, Lenin argues that the freedom the opponent - by

now declared a bourgeois-anarchist individualist - may have in mind
has never existed: true freedom can exist only in the Communist future,
where the fundamental economic "unfreedom" of capitalism is elimi-
nated. Lenin still insists here that no short-sighted opponent should

mistake the leader of the Party for an autocrat, and emphasizes that,
within the Party, discussion will always remain free: "Calm yourselves,
gentlemen! First of all, we are discussing Party literature and its
subordination to Party control. Everyone is free to write and say

whatever he likes without any restriction."

13

At this point, however,

he introduces a rhetorical twist that undermines what he has just said.
He emphasizes that "freedom of speech and the press must be absolute,
but so must the freedom of association. I am bound to accord you, in

the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your
heart's content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom
of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from associating
with people advocating this or that view" (my italics).

14

It is worth noting that at this point the polemicist switches to the

"I," the first person singular. Who is this "I"? Is Lenin here referring

to himself as an ordinary Party member, a member of the Party
leadership, or the one and only leader of the Party? If the "I" refers
to the leader as the representative of the entire Party, his withdrawal

from associating with the person in opposition carries the threat of that
person's expulsion from the Party. In the one-party system of dictatorship,
being expelled from the Party became tantamount to disenfranchisement
and possibly liquidation.

As early as 1904 Trotsky observes that "it is essential to Lenin's

position to substitute Party for class; the segment of professional
revolutionaries for Party; and the Central Committee for the revolu-
tionaries."

15

Trotsky also foresaw that this process would lead to the

total power of one individual dictator.

16

In fact, the dictator is already

here in the "I" that suddenly appears in Lenin's 1905 essay in the

1X2 The Soviet Union 19ZOS-195OS

middle of his argument. And should one simply accept the sudden
equation between the right to free speech and the "right to shout and
lie"? What started as Lenin's vindication of the "absolute" freedom of
speech has ended, within the same paragraph, as a condemnation
of the very idea of free speech as nothing but "shouting and lying,"
to be punished by expulsion from the Party.

It is also at this point that the 1905 essay, written more than a

decade before the revolution and almost three decades away from the
Stalin-Zhdanov decree, comes to foreshadow Stalin's pre-war and post-
war purges: "The party is a voluntary association, which would inev-
itably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not
cleanse itself of people advocating anti-party views" (my italics).

17

Although Lenin in 1905 might not have associated the purging or
cleansing of the Party with Stalinist methods of punishing and perse-
cuting intellectual dissent on the scale of keeping about one-tenth of the
population in prison camps, the militant tone towards any opposition
reveals intolerance.

At the end of the essay Lenin dismisses his opponent's "bourgeois

individualist" argument by insisting that all his "talk about absolute
freedom is sheer hypocrisy because the so-called freedom of the bour-
geois writer or artist ... is simply a masked (or hypocritically masked)
dependence on the moneybag, on corruption, on prostitution."

18

(It is

interesting that Orwell also reflects upon this point, admitting the
limitations of the writer's freedom under capitalism; he argues, how-
ever, that these limitations are a great deal more severe in a country
ruled by a one-party system.)

19

Lenin implies that the real freedom of

literature can arrive only in the Utopian future, when it will be openly
linked with the proletariat, and by then "all social-democratic literature
must become Party literature!" (my italics).

20

It is worth noting how frequently Lenin repeats the term "must" in

his essay on literature. It follows from the dictatorial imperative dis-
guised as scientific certainty that once certain historical-political pat-
terns are identified, the effect simply "must" (not will, or would, or
may) follow from the cause. It is also at this point that we should
examine Lenin's pejorative use of the word "utopia." He emphasizes
Marx's point that there must be a sharp distinction between socialism
in its "primitive Utopian forms" and "scientific socialism."

11

In effect,

the crucial difference between the naive, self-deluding, or outright
hypocritical opponents and the speaker of oracular wisdom should be
located in the sharp distinction between their inferior, outmoded "uto-
pia" and the speaker's genuinely Marxist "scientific socialism"; in the
latter, socialism "must" follow capitalism, and Communism "must"
follow socialism in the causal chain of the "scientifically" proven
principles of the Law of History.

The Writer on Trial

1 2 3

Since the speaker's picture of the future is "scientific" and therefore

irrefutable, it is no doubt the opponent's naively unscientific or "uto-
pian" way of thinking that is inferior, liable to be contaminated by
infectious bourgeois liberalism: "We" - that is, scientific socialists -
"are not Utopian," Lenin emphasizes, "and we know the real value of

bourgeois 'arguments.'"" This, in the context of the essay, means that

the argument for free speech advocated by the opponent expresses a

"bourgeois individualist" mentality and, as such, is nothing but sheer

hypocrisy, indeed a hidden attempt at sabotaging the historical process
that "must" lead towards the victory of the proletariat, and "must"
do so under the leadership of the Party of professional revolutionaries.

Lenin's tone and strategies on these issues are polemical. The speaker

seems totally oblivious of the definition of literature - or art in general

- as an aesthetic creation; he simply wants to overcome an irritating
opponent who would like to trap the speaker into agreement about a
possibly non-utilitarian discussion on the function of art. At times in
the essay Lenin's tone is already reminiscent of Stalin's, showing no
sense of hesitation or speculation in the face of a complex problem,

as if all questions about literature and the artistic process had already
been established once and for all and with a logic that should be crystal

clear for everyone. At the same time, he also implies that such clarity
of reason can be attained only by those who are "politically correct,"
whose heart is in the right place and who place all their bets on the

right goal: the achievement of Communism, the historical triumph of
the proletariat.

From this stance of absolute certainty follows an acerbic, angry,

often irritable tone, as if saying: "If you don't agree with my observa-
tions about, let us say, the colour scheme of Leonardo's Last Supper,

it must inevitably follow that you are an enemy who, given the threats
surrounding the cause of the proletariat's struggle, deserves to be
expelled from the Party, silenced, or eliminated." Obviously, it would
be naive to expect that such intolerance of even the mildest form of

opposition, a hostility deriving from the speaker's absolute certitude
in the irrefutably "scientific" truth of his own principles, would get

milder once the speaker has achieved political power. One can already
hear the Lenin of the Tenth Party Congress: "We have no use for
opposition. We must have an end to opposition, put the lid on it. We

have had enough of it."

2

-

3

In Lenin's utilitarian position on the arts,

whose energy he must harness in the service of the Communist future,
the germs of severe state censorship and the persecution of dissent are
already clearly present.

At other times, however, it seems Lenin took care to point out that

even his judgment or aesthetic taste had its limitations. It is on record,
for example, that he had the remarkable modesty to admit to Gorky

1 2 4

The Soviet Union 192.0S-1950S

in conversation: "I am not an admirer of [Mayakovsky's] poetical
talent, although I admit I am not a competent judge."

14

How rare,

however, even here, are the admissions of modesty, the admissions of
the natural limitations connected with any individual's subjective tastes
or opinions. In his discussion of modern art Lenin takes it for granted
that a liking for the avant-garde is "pure hypocrisy and of course

deference to the art fashions ruling the West."

25

With the mock humil-

ity of one who is absolutely certain of being superior to his "opponent"

(in this case, one who loves avant-garde art), Lenin makes "bold to

declare [himself] a barbarian": "It is beyond me to consider the
products of expressionism, futurism, cubism and other 'isms' the high-
est manifestations of artistic genius. I do not understand them. I
experience no joy from them."

26

His utterances about the art of his contemporaries are old-fashioned

and parochial, but, in spite of occasional instances of modesty, he
seems to have been proud of these limitations as a sign of revolutionary
purity, of his cunning vigilance against the bourgeois enemy within -
and we have noted that he would label anyone standing up for the
freedom of expression first a "bourgeois individualist" and then a

"bourgeois individualist anarchist" - allusions to more and more

dangerous and wider and wider representations of the intellectual
opponent as "the enemy."

THE CENTRAL DRAMA OF UNMASKING

THE ENEMY: THE MASTER PLOTTER

The ever-increasing oversimplification of aesthetic issues and the accel-
eration of hysteria about the more and more pervasive presence of this
mysterious internal "enemy" of the Soviet system remain important

elements in the militant pronouncements about literature of Stalin and
his puppet, Zhdanov, first in 1934 and then in 1946: "We are put on
the front of ideology, we have great tasks that have international
significance, and this must increase every true Soviet literary figure's
sense of responsibility before one's people, state, Party - the sense of
the importance of the duty that is being fulfilled."

27

Stalin's own

pathological obsession with enemies, spies, saboteurs - a staple ingre-
dient in his virtually unchanging politics of terror over thirty years -
is now imposed as a "must" on the writer when constructing a plot

and establishing a cast of characters. Indeed, in a speech called "On
the work in the countryside," delivered in 1933, Stalin reveals himself
as a "master plotter," a mind that approaches the art of governance
as a writer of a thriller would approach scenarios of conspiracies,
intrigue, and villainy. The visual concretization of the ugliness of the

The Writer on Trial

1 2 5

enemy and the unmistakable delight the speaker takes in unmasking
villains are obvious signs of his own temperament:

The class enemy is to be sought outside the kolkhozes, in the guise of people
with beastly physiognomies, with huge teeth, thick necks, and sawed-off
shotguns in their hands ... [yet today] kulaks and pseudo-kulaks, today's anti-
Soviet elements in the village - these people are for the most part "quiet,"
"sweet," almost "holy" ... They are within the kolkhoz itself, as storeroom

workers, accountants, secretaries, etc. [They are responsible for] sabotage and
damage [making it] necessary to possess revolutionary vigilance - it is necessary
to possess the ability to tear the mask off the enemy and show the kolkhoz
members his true counterrevolutionary face.

28

Stalin's political speech in this instance could easily be regarded as

the scenario for the kolkhoz novel (with small changes of locale, of
course, it is also the scenario of the factory novel, where the positive
hero has to "unmask" the saboteur); it is also a demonstration of a

political leader priding himself on literary invention, a natural legisla-
tor on genres, content, and style. It is not accidental that in this
militarized atmosphere of aesthetics, the vision of trial and punishment
lurks as a constant threat not only for the villain in the literary work
but also for its author. As Dobrenko has pointed out, "variations on

the 'enemies all around' theme occur as early as the 1920s" in Simonov's
'The Red and the White,' 'Friends and Enemies,' 'They and Us'; the
positive and the negative heroes: this is the basis of our lexicon,
attributes of a role-based, confrontational, mythologized conscious-

ness."

29

Since Stalin's post-war political scenario returned very soon

to pre-war methods of terror, inducing a veritable spy mania with
show-trials staged within the Soviet Union and in the satellite coun-
tries, the tone of post-war literature did not introduce major changes:
"It is impossible to find a single work of postwar literature where there
are no clear or concealed enemies: the black-and-white scheme of those

years simply could not exist without them. The literature at the
beginning of the 1950s was engulfed by variations on the 'enemies all
around' theme, in the anticosmopolite rendition [when] mass psychosis
has reached its apogee ... Spy mania, as well as general suspicion which

is at one with a militant anti-intellectualism of sorts, envelops many
of the works of those years."

30

The only thing the official literature of the day would not mention,

of course, was the identity of the real enemy responsible for the trial
of innocent people, for the hunt for more and more scapegoats, for

new and ever newer human sacrifice at the altar of totalitarian dicta-
torship. Works that did not follow the official Guidelines - that is,

1 2 6

The Soviet Union 19ZOS-195OS

works critical of the regime, thereby conveying the message of anti-
utopia or dystopia - were simply not published, and writers suspected
of subversive ideas were silenced.

Naturally, a certain kind of criticism was always permissible even

within the framework of Socialist Realism. It was the task of the writer
to draw attention to mistakes - but these mistakes were invariably
traced to the vestiges of old, pre-revolutionary prejudices or a not yet
fully enlightened class consciousness; these mistakes were committed
against the Party or the regime. Criticism attacking mistakes committed
by the Party first became possible after Khruschov's condemnation of

Stalin's own "mistakes," at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.
Consequently, more and more daring criticism, still under the brand
name of Socialist Realism, became possible, introducing first an inversion
and then gradually a rejection of some of the Guidelines.

I N V E R S I O N S O F S O C I A L I S T R E A L I S M :

DUDINTSEV'S NOT BY BREAD ALONE

Novels that follow the aesthetic commands of Socialist Realism but
end up inverting its Utopian ideology, such as Vaculik's Axe and Klima's
An Hour of Silence, already include elements of anti-utopias or dysto-
pias. Examplary of the ambiguities of these inversions is Dudintsev's
Not by Bread Alone, published in 1956 - that is, after the Twentieth
Party Congress. At first it seems that the author still practises the kind

of criticism associated with the officially approved "production novel,"
where after the discovery of certain mistakes that slow down produc-
tion, villains are punished and eliminated, productivity is restored, and
we are presented with a happy ending, the hero endorsing the Party's
leadership in its invincible march towards the socialist future. However,
what becomes clear from this novel is that "the methods associated
with socialist realism could be turned against the party-state apparatus,
portraying it as an obstacle to the building of socialism."

31

At first glance it seems that Dudintsev observes most of the commands

of Socialist Realism. Schoolmaster Lopatkin's characterization follows
the larger-than-life heroism of the "positive hero": his faith in his inven-
tion, which is to advance socialism, is unbreakable. In his approach to
life he is Spartan, to sexuality a puritan. In fact, his feelings for the
heroine are far less passionate than his feelings for his invention and
his Communist duty, and this, we are given to believe, is precisely why
she loves him. A man of working-class origin, Lopatkin is passionately
dedicated to perfecting his invention, a virtually miraculous machine
for casting steel tubes, because the country cannot yet produce them in
sufficient number or the right quality for its enormously accelerated

The Writer on Trial

12.7

process of industrialization. However, in the course of trying to have
his excellent invention accepted, Lopatkin comes upon an involved,
complex bureaucracy in the Institute for Scientific Inventions and

unravels a consistent conspiracy among factory directors, bureaucrats,
scientists, academicians, and Party officials, who envy anyone with
original ideas and suspect anyone with moral integrity. The conspiracy
manages not only to stall the acceptance of his invention but also to
discredit him. As a result, he has to stand trial and is sentenced to years
of hard labour in Siberia. The narrative by now reveals its essential
affinity with what we have suggested to be the narrative line of dysto-
pia: it is a critique of the elite's nightmarish conspiracy for the miscar-
riage of justice; the protagonist comes to understand the elite's motives
for its conspiracy, but only at the point when he has to face a trial and
take an unfair punishment.

Before the end of the novel, however, the narrative takes a turn that

allows the author to return to the compulsory affirmation dictated by
Socialist Realism. The prosecutor who sentenced Lopatkin to hard
labour experiences a change of heart and reopens the case, only to
confirm that Lopatkin was not guilty. Lopatkin is allowed to return
from Siberia and is helped to break through the resistance of the whole
cabal that had formerly been against him. His machine is accepted as
a significant invention, and he receives an award. He believes he has
earned the right to marry the woman who sacrificed everything for
him throughout his years of hardship, and to settle down to a life of
peace and comfort. However, at the last moment he recognizes that
his former enemies are not only his enemies but also the enemies of

socialism, and that they are still in position to sabotage or conspire
against any honest but politically inexperienced inventor such as he
used to be; he decides to dedicate his life to clearing the way for such
new inventors by fighting against the machine of bureaucracy that
almost succeeded in grinding him down. In other words, he regains
his "optimistic" faith in the regime: it is still building socialism, and
is worth fighting for.

Naturally, the first part of the novel, which unravels the elaborate

conspiracy of the self-serving elite, is far more convincing than the
ending, with its somewhat forced return to Socialist Realist affirma-
tion. Eventually the novel that was first received with great enthusiasm

at its appearance in Novi Mir became the centre of stormy critical
debates instigated by the bureaucracy of the Party and the Writers'
Union; the writer was expelled from "every possible organization" and
prevented from publishing for decades; the Novi Mir editor responsible
for the novel's appearance in print was dismissed (and advised to go
into voluntary exile to Tashkent).

32

128 The Soviet Union 1920S-1950S

D I R E C T A T T A C K O N S O C I A L I S T R E A L I S M :

A B R A M T E R T Z S I N Y A V S K I

In their combined effect, Abram Tertz Sinyavski's 1959 essay "On

Socialist Realism" and its companion piece, The Trial Begins, are far
more direct, more savagely ironic attacks on the Soviet regime than is
Dudintsev's novel. Tertz was the first Soviet writer to attempt an in-
depth analysis of the literary formula imposed on writers and critics
by the totalitarian police-state in the name of building a Utopian future.
It is no accident that in the novel, set in 1953, the last year of Stalin's
reign, Tertz presents us with an elaborate conspiracy of the elite to
engineer another chain-reaction of show-trials, beginning with the trial
of the teenage son of the Prosecutor himself. Tertz not only shows that
the rigged trials and the deliberate persecution of the innocent were
the very essence of Stalin's regime, but he also draws attention to the
complicity of the self-serving state bureaucrats, who would, of course,

still have been in power in 1959 - a point that would not have been
lost on Tertz's Soviet readers. Since the book was smuggled abroad to
be published, one wonders whether this point was equally clear to the
Western reader at the time.

Both the essay and the novel go far beyond the limits of criticism

permitted even in a period of a relative "thaw"; in fact, they challenge
the very principles of Socialist Realism. Tertz defines the very term as
a "strange and jarring phrase," an irrational concept that combines
the "nightmare [of] Stalin's dictatorship" with "a crude propaganda
trick of Zhdanov" and a "senile fancy of Gorky" (Stalin, Zhdanov,

and Gorky being the three authors responsible for the 1934 coinage).

Tertz argues that, whether approached as "fiction, myth or propa-

ganda," Socialist Realism is based on a paradox that goes far beyond
the aesthetic problem of representing reality, to the paradox inherent
in the contradiction between a secular versus a religious, or an ideal-
istic versus materialistic definition of reality itself. What Tertz ironically
calls the "innocent formula" of Socialist Realism contains the far from

innocent "secret" of an unresolved contradiction to be located right
in its 1934 founding document, which states that "the basic method
of Soviet literature and literary criticism ... demands of the artist the
truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolution-
ary development" (116). The formula imposes a moral-intellectual
straitjacket - literally a double-bind - on the writer, by declaring it the
writer's "duty" to present reality truthfully, yet not the way it is but
the way it should be. Can you present reality "truthfully" while you

are forcibly directed to transform the readers' consciousness in the
name of the compelling ideal of the future? Can you provide a realistic

The Writer on Trial 129

description of the present while being allowed to view it only through
the fixed rear-view mirror of the imagined future?

Tertz defines this dilemma in the concept of a "Purpose with a

capital P ... an all-embracing ideal, toward which truthfully repre-
sented reality ascends in an undeviating revolutionary movement. To
direct this movement toward its end and to help the reader approach

it more closely by transforming his consciousness - that is the Purpose
of socialist realism, the most purposeful art of our time" (150).

In the name of this ultimate "purposefulness" of history that the true

Communist is asked to embrace with the militant fanaticism of the

Middle Ages, private morality and personal emotions simply disappear,
until in the name of the "great ideal before us ... we free ourselves

without regret from belief in afterlife, from love of our neighbour, from
freedom of the individual and other prejudices." Although originally
the revolutionary may have set out "to correct the universe according

to ... the shining model of the Purpose" (162), once he condoned
impersonal violence as a means to reach the paradise of the future, he
had to come to a tragic realization: inhuman, cruel means dissipate the

originally noble end: "So that prisons would vanish forever, we built
new prisons. So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves

with a Chinese Wall. So that work should become a rest and pleasure,
we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood be shed any
more, we killed and killed and killed" (141).

To see the poverty and brutality of Soviet reality the way it is, yet

to depict it from the perspective of the Party, that is, the way it should
be, demands the ability to practise what Orwell called Doublethink,
an ability that in the true believer becomes the "right instinct." Ironi-

cally, Tertz praises Khruschov for demanding such a state of deliber-
ately induced schizophrenia from every Communist writer, for whom
"the question does not [even] arise whether he is free or not in his

creative work ... [and who] need not conform or force himself, [because
the true ... party spirit] is a necessity of his soul" (166, my italics).

To adhere to the Party line as "a necessity of one's soul" is a

fundamental characteristic not only of the writer but also of the

"positive hero," who, except for a few insignificant flaws to make him

appear human, is in fact a creature crafted to be the Communist
answer to Nietszche's Superman. The positive hero's most important

emotion is his passionate and fundamentally religious commitment to
that higher purpose defined by the Party line, but defined in a different

way every day. In other words, once a fictional character has the right
feelings for the current Party line, he becomes the positive hero, and
it follows that all his emotional relationships must be exemplary: "To

read the books of the last twenty or thirty years," noted Tertz ironically

1 3 0

The Soviet Union 192.0S-1950S

in i960, "is to feel the great power of the positive hero," who "spread
in every direction, until he filled all our literature. There are books in
which all the heroes are positive" (174-5).

The blatant hypocrisy of the formula that demands that the positive

hero should be virtually suprahuman is a reflection of the "insolvable
contradiction," that "a socialist, i.e. a purposeful, a religious, art
cannot be produced with the literary method of what the nineteenth
century called 'realism.' And a really faithful representation of life
cannot be achieved in a language based on teleogical concepts" (215).

Tertz concludes that "the result is a loathsome literary salad" that

is ultimately "none too socialist and not at all realist" (215). To
salvage Soviet fiction he recommends that writers "put ... hope in a
phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a purpose," and he
ends the essay with a wish: "May the fantastic imagery of Hoffman
and Dostoevski, of Goya, Chagall, and Mayakovski ... and of many
realists and non-realists teach us how to be truthful with the aid of
the absurd and the fantastic" (218-19).

Although this sentence has been widely quoted by postmodern

critics, it seems to me that none of them has noted Tertz's emphasis
that the writer should be allowed to be "truthful," whether he uses
the strategies of "realists [or] non-realists." In his novel The Trial
Begins Tertz indeed presents us with a genuinely "truthful" picture of

society the way the author sees it and not the way he should see it -
a spirited challenge to the central formula of Socialist Realism and,
simultaneously, a dark satire of the Party's ideology aiming to cover
up for the horrible flaws of a dystopic society.

D Y S T O P I A N F I C T I O N A S A C R I T I Q U E

O F S O C I A L I S T R E A L I S M

To demonstrate one of the salient features of a dystopic society, let us
take a look at the fate of some of those who refused to sing its praises.

Our study deals with a selection of twenty-odd works expressive of
the dystopian impulse, written in the

USSR

between 1920 and 1991,

and in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989.

Except for Koestler, who wrote and published his novel in the West,

many writers on our list were either unable to publish their work in
book form (Zamiatin, Zazubrin, Platonov, Grossman, Vaculik); had to
wait ten to twenty years to have their work published (Ribakov, Dalos,
Moldova); or had to smuggle their work abroad to have it published

(Serge, Tertz, Daniel). They were silenced for a considerable period

and exiled (Zamiatin, Serge, Zinoviev, Voinovich, Aksyonov); tried and
sentenced to prison (Dery; Havel); tried and sentenced to hard labour

(Tertz, Daniel); or executed (Zazubrin, Rodionov).

The Writer on Trial

1 3 1

Of course, the fate of the writer or the text does not by itself qualify

these works as dystopian fiction. Neither can one expect to classify all
those works dystopian that were written, suppressed, or simply hidden
away during the Stalin or the Brezhnev regime and brought to public
attention between the 1960s and the 1980s. My aim has been to find

works of fiction, written during the totalitarian regime, in which the
dystopian impetus is the central thrust - that is, works that pay closer
attention to the social-political criticism of the regime as a nightmare
society than to psychological exploration, or that take a more direct
interest in the utopian-dystopian discourse in the human drama acted
out in the arena of history than in the human being's relationship to
God or to the universe. This selection does not include Pasternak's

Doctor Zhivago or Solzhenitsin's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
or Cancer Ward, not because these works are not revelatory of the
dystopic qualities of the regime but because they are probably prima-
rily tragic explorations of their characters' spiritual life in the frame-

work of psychological realism. In other words, although Pasternak's
and Solzhenitsin's characters move about in a recognizably dystopic
society, the writer's interest is not primarily social or political.

Naturally, some works more directly focused on the contemplation

of history and politics, like Grossman's Life and Fate, for example, may
also attempt psychologically dimensional characterization. Conversely,

Pasternak and Solzhenitsin may also use some of the strategies of a
dystopian critique of society. In another configuration, Solzhenitsin's

The Gulag Archipelago is a comprehensive and compelling analysis of

the Soviet Union under Stalin as a dystopic society - however, it is not
a work of fiction.

The works we examine in the next seven chapters are simply a

selection, not at all implying that works not on our list would therefore
not qualify as dystopian fiction. I hope, however, that the selection will
be found sufficiently consistent to display the maximum number of

themes and strategies we defined as characteristic of the dystopian
impetus: the interaction between tragic and satirical elements; the push
and pull between Utopian and dystopian perspectives; revelations about
the barbaric state religion; the central drama of trial and retribution
in the nightmare atmosphere of a society with a machinery for the
organized miscarriage of justice. It has been my intention to show in

this chapter that in the context of the aesthetic and political principles
of Socialist Realism, both the literary work and the writer depicting
the true face of a nightmare society behind the mask of the state Utopia
have themselves been put on trial.

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